Russia to pay Kazakhstan $76 million for 'dirty' oil
The Russian state-owned company Transneft will pay a compensation of about $76 million to the Kazakh national oil transporter KazTransOil for contaminated oil, reports Deutsche Welle news agency.
"Loss of quality, downtime, and storage are included in the amount of compensation," - said one of the sources of Bloomberg. A formal agreement between the two operators has not yet been signed. Earlier, Reuters reported that Russia will pay Kazakhstan a fixed amount for contaminated oil.
According to the preliminary terms of the agreement, Transneft will reimburse KazTransOil or the carriers from Kazakhstan, which have delivered conditioned raw materials to the system, and received contaminated oil in Ust-Luga. After that, the producers will be able to compensate for the losses to the buyers.
According to traders' estimates, the volume of contaminated Kazakhstan's export oil is 700 thousand tons out of approximately 5 million tons of substandard raw materials that fell into Transneft's oil pipeline system.
Problems with the quality of Russian oil began in April. The Belarusian concern Belneftekhim was the first to report about its pollution with organochlorine.