Russian oil companies have asked Indian refineries to increase gasoline supplies to Russia, Reuters reports, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
At least one shipment of Indian gasoline is already on its way to Russia, and others will follow, but oil producers are asking for more because they have lost about 40% of their refinery capacity, the agency’s sources said.
According to them, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft approached their Indian counterparts. The former in July lost the Syzran and Saratov refineries, which halted production after UAV attacks. The latter in June lost the Moscow refinery and, in addition, was forced to stop the Omsk refinery — the largest in Russia and for a long time considered out of reach for Ukrainian drones.
Oil companies approached both private and state-owned refineries in India, but they said they had no spare volumes for export, Reuters sources said. Nevertheless, according to the agency, additional gasoline supplies are possible through intermediaries who would transfer the fuel from tanker to tanker at sea.
Russia may also ask India for diesel fuel, Reuters sources say. Its output has collapsed by 40% at the height of the harvest campaign, and the authorities have been forced to manually allocate available volumes in order to supply stores with products. For now, domestic diesel production covers demand, Reuters’ sources say, but Ukrainian attacks could knock out even more refining capacity. Restoring it quickly is impossible, according to the agency’s sources. It will take at least two months to bring production back, and that is only if there are no new raids.
According to EA Analytics estimates, oil refining volumes in Russia in July fell to their lowest level since 2005 — 3.91 million barrels per day. That is 27% less than in July last year and 30% below the level of the same month in pre-war 2021.
Energy Intelligence analysts put Russia’s current oil refining volumes even lower — at 3.58 million barrels per day, which may be the lowest level since at least 2002. At present, capacity amounting to 3.1 million barrels per day is idle, while Russia’s current shortfall in petroleum products reaches 400,000–600,000 tons per month, Energy Intelligence estimates, adding that supplies from Belarus and Kazakhstan can cover only half of this deficit.
