Russia’s Lukoil Starts Oil Exports to China
Russian oil major Lukoil will export its first trial batch of oil to China in November-December, the company’s vice president Leonid Fedun said at a presentation of the company’s bonds on Thursday.
Fedun made the announcement at the presentation of Lukoil’s new bonds. He did not specify the details of the supplies.
Earlier in November, an official with the East Siberian Railway company, a subsidiary of Russian state company Russian Railways, said that the East Siberian Railway plans to sign an agreement on oil supplies to China with Lukoil before the end of this year. Lukoil’s first batch of oil to be exported to China may amount to 100,000 tonnes, the official added.
Gennady Fadeyev, the president of Russian Railways, said in late October that his company was ready to lower tariffs for transporting oil to China if the amount of oil supplies increases to 30 million tonnes per year. At the moment, Russian oil major Yukos is the only company supplying Russian oil to China.
There are no pipelines linking China and Russia and Yukos currently exports oil to China by rail. Under an agreement with China, in 2004 Yukos was to export about 3.8 million tonnes of oil to the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and 2.6 million tonnes to Sinopec.
In late September, Yukos stopped oil exports to CNPC, which then stood at about 400,000 tonnes of oil per month, via the Zabaikalsk railway station on the Russian-Chinese border. But Yukos continues to export oil to Sinopec via the Naushki railway station, which is situated on the Russian border with Mongolia.
