Kazakhstan’s oil and gas condensate production declined by 6% in the first two days of December, an industry source said on Thursday, following a Ukrainian drone attack on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s (CPC) Black Sea loading facility.
The CPC pipeline, which carries over 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports and handles more than 1% of global supply, suspended operations on Saturday after a mooring at the terminal, located near Russia’s Novorossiysk port, was damaged.
It later resumed supplies using one single point mooring (SPM) instead of the two it usually deploys. A third unit, now under maintenance which started before the strikes, is acting as a backup.
Kazakhstan’s oil and gas condensate production declined in the first two days of December to 1.9 million barrels per day from an average output in November, according to the source and Reuters calculations.
Kazakhstan’s energy ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The fall in oil production shows the impact of the CPC drone attack on OPEC+ member Kazakhstan, which exported about 68.6 million tons of oil last year and is the world’s 12th-largest oil producer.
ONE CPC MOORING FULLY OPERATIONAL, SAYS MINISTER
The CPC’s 1,500 km (930 miles) pipeline brings crude from the Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan fields of Kazakhstan to the Yuzhnaya Ozereevka terminal at Novorossiysk. CPC’s main suppliers are fields in Kazakhstan and it also gets crude from Russian producers.
Kazakhstan’s Deputy Energy Minister Yerlan Akbarov said on Thursday that one of the CPC’s moorings at the Black Sea terminal was fully operational, and there were no restrictions for oil transportation.
Five industry sources told Reuters on Wednesday that Kazakhstan will divert more crude through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline in December due to the capacity reduction at CPC.
Kazakh producers also ship crude to Russia’s Novorossiysk and Ust-Luga ports under the KEBCO brand and to Germany via the Druzhba pipeline, but those routes offer lower margins and depend on the capacity of Russian pipeline operator Transneft.
Options for re-routing oil from landlocked Kazakhstan are limited as Russia’s pipeline system is stretched after repeated drone strikes on its refineries and export facilities.
Another industry source estimated the loss of CPC loading capacity when using only one SPM at 900,000 tons a week.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Ed Osmond)