Yukos set to lose two key export routes

Russian oil firm Yukos is likely to lose two key export routes this year by pipeline to its Lithuanian plant and by river putting more pressure on its strained finances.

Vedomosti business daily reported yesterday that Russia's pipeline monopoly had not allocated Yukos any export quotas to Lithuania's 180,000-barrels-per-day Mazeikiu refinery in April-June, forcing the plant to turn to other suppliers.

Volgotanker, Europe's largest river shipper of oil, also said yesterday it would not ship Yukos volumes from the firm's Samara group of refineries in the Volga region to the Black Sea port of Kavkaz and Baltic Sea St Petersburg.

"We are in talks with other firms to ship oil to Kavkaz and St Petersburg at the moment, but we haven't got any request from Yukos and are not going to ship its crude and products in 2005," Volgotanker's vice-president Andrei Kleimyonov said.

Yukos, once Russia's top blue-chip oil firm, has been paralysed by tax authorities, which froze its accounts and demanded a back-tax payment of $28 billion, in a move seen as a Kremlin plot to punish its owners for political ambitions.

To help pay off the tax claim, the authorities sold off Yukos's former key production unit Yugansk, which produces 1 million bpd, or 60 per cent of Yukos's output. Yugansk was ultimately bought by state oil firm Rosneft.

Export from Lithuania, where Yukos also controls the 200,000 bpd Butinge port, and from its Samara plants to the Black Sea, helped it in the past years to generate extra cash amid booming output and Russia's pipeline export capacity shortage.

Mazeikiu's potential new suppliers include Lukoil, TNK-BP, Sibneft and Rosneft, Vedomosti said.

Interfax news agency also said Yukos could use other, less profitable, export routes in the second quarter.

These include 800,000 tonnes or 10 cargoes over 3 months from Ukraine's Black Sea Odessa, usually loading Kazakh crude, and 390,000 tonnes or 5 cargoes from Ukraine's Yuzhny.

Yukos may also get a 340,000-tonne export position from Butinge, or around 4 cargoes over 3 months, and a 430,000-tonne export position to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline.

The figures are part of Russia's quarterly pipeline export schedule, which is a preliminary guide to upcoming exports.