[[{“value”:”
- New US sanctions have led to a significant reduction in Russian oil exports as traders halt offers.
- Indian refiners, including Bharat Petroleum, are struggling to secure Russian oil for March delivery.
- Standard Chartered predicts that the sanctions will remove more Russian barrels from the market and lead to higher oil prices.
Middlemen who supply Russian oil have stopped offering cargoes after the latest U.S. sanctions imposed by the Biden administration targeting Russian producers, tankers and insurers, Bharat Petroleum CFO has revealed. The sanctions have targeted Surgutneftgas and Gazprom Neft, two Russian oil firms that handle 25% of Russian oil exports. The two companies shipped an average of 970,000 bbls a day in 2024. Bharat Petroleum and other Indian state refiners buy Russian oil in the spot market, mainly from traders.
“We have not received any new offers for the March window (delivery). Traders are asking us to wait. We are waiting to get offers,” Vetsa Ramakrishna Gupta told Reuters on Wednesday.
“We are not expecting the similar number of cargoes that we used to get in the months of December and January,” he added.
Earlier, India announced that it will abide by the sanctions and turn away sanctioned tankers. Previously, we reported that the sanctions would severely disrupt Russian oil exports to India and China–the biggest buyers of Russian crude–and could also give Trump more leverage in future negotiations as he tries to end the war in Ukraine. Last year, India briefly overtook China as the largest buyer of Russian crude. However, India’s import of Russian oil in November plummeted 55% Y/Y to its lowest point since June 2022. This could be the result of the country trying to diversify its oil supplies to avoid overlying on a single country.
Standard Chartered has predicted that the strength in oil markets in the early innings of the new year is likely to continue, powered by, among other things, the removal of more Russian barrels from the market following the sanctions. According to StanChart, the new restrictions roughly triple the number of directly sanctioned Russian crude oil tankers, enough to affect around 900 thousand barrels per day (kb/d). Whereas it’s highly likely that Russia will try to circumvent the sanctions by employing even more shadow fleet tankers and ship-to-ship transfers, StanChart sees 500kb/d of displacements over the next six months.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
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The post U.S. Sanctions Trigger Russian Oil Exodus appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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