In Russia, there was a 10 day long break in the purchase of Russian oil by European oil refiners due to the belief that it was contaminated by Russia. There were many theories about this issue, but the most interesting was the theory of this being sabotage. There is no explanation as to how the oil was contaminated, but the scale of the contamination says “corrupted crude” could have been pumped into the pipeline for days, or even weeks. Belarus said on Tuesday that the volume of contaminated crude could be as high as 5 million tons – equivalent to a month’s exports via Druzhba of about 1.2 million barrels a day and worth $2.7 billion. In a news briefing on Friday, Igor Dyomin, an aide to Transneft’s Tokarev, told Russian media “the contamination was intentional”. The pollution was detected at the private Samara Transneft-terminal, where oil is pumped into the Transneft network by several small producers, Dyomin was quoted as saying. He did not name the producers and said investigators were searching several private companies in the Samara region. Tokarev told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that the oil had been contaminated deliberately by a private company. Putin said the crisis had caused very serious economic, material and reputational damage.“This company … has deliberately injected oil that was not properly prepared,” said Tokarev, adding that the unnamed company accumulated oil from small producers in the Ulyanovsk, Orenburg and Samara regions of Russia. Putin said on Saturday that law enforcement agencies could step in if Transneft’s internal investigation failed to provide enough answers. I think if this continues, there will be a lot of issues, mainly economically due to the huge oil industry Russia has. The theory that this is sabotage may not be correct, but hopefully they will come up with a solution/agreement so this doesn’t turn into a bigger issue.
