Russia’s European partners, that have been trying to find alternative sources of the natural gas lately, started to avoid using Russian oil as well. According to official cargo plans, for the first five months of this year the supplies of crude oil to the European Union through the Baltic and Black Sea ports fell by 19% from the previous year. This is a rather significant decrease bearing in mind that Europe imported the biggest share of oil from Russia. However, the European countries have found new suppliers.
With the current conditions on the global oil market, which is still trying to overcome the oversupply problem, it was quite easy to find new partners. The Russian oil companies were replaced by their rivals from the Middle East. Furthermore, the United States expands the scope of activities. Last week, it boosted the exports of crude oil to the countries all over the world by 2.3 million barrels per day. Besides, it plans to increase the supplies to the European countries. Apart from political tensions, there are also some technological issues. The new petroleum processing technologies that are employed at the European oil refineries use the low sulfur oil. That is why the Russian Urals crude benchmark is trading near the 4-year lows in Europe. But the Russians managed to find other marketing channels. Thus, the export of the Urals to China expanded by 43% to 750K barrels per day in the first quarter. So, the law of conservation of energy works.
