MOSCOW (MRC) -- More than a million tonnes of organic chloride contaminated oil from Russia's Druzhba ("Friendship") pipeline is expected to be shipped back from Belarus. The oil, diluted to usable levels is routed for Russian refineries and export ports, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The pipeline was halted in April after excessive levels of organic chloride used in oil extraction were found on the million-barrel-per-day pipeline that crosses Belarus and serves customers as far west as Germany.
Pipeline operator Transneft, which denies responsibility for the contamination, has agreed to pump back 1.3 million tonnes of oil from Belarus and has begun doing so.
It has pledged to reduce organic chloride levels that in some places topped 300 parts per million (ppm) to a usable 6 ppm by blending tainted crude with clean oil in its network, according to three industry sources who spoke to Reuters on Friday.
"Dirty oil will be stored and slowly diluted with clean volumes that go to Russian refineries and to all main ports - Novorossiisk, Primorsk, Ust-Luga," the source said.
Primorsk - the biggest Urals export port by volume - is currently the only purely clean Urals export route.
The oil will first be stored in tanks along the Russian part of the Druzhba pipeline, one of the sources said.
From Unecha near the border with Belarus it will be sent along the Unecha-Samara pipeline to storage in the Samara region which can store up to 1.5 million tonnes of oil, the source said.
Once mixed with clean flows it will be delivered to refineries in European Russia, the Baltic Sea export ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk and Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, the sources said.
Transneft and the Energy Ministry did not reply to Reuters requests for immediate comment.
As MRC wrote before, in early June 2019, the Czech oil refinery at Litvinov, owned by PKN Orlen unit Unipetrol, started receiving oil from state emergency reserves due to halt in Russian supplies via the Druzhba pipeline.
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