Belarus is asking for a 39% increase in the oil transit fee from January. It justifies this by saying that it expects a big drop in oil transported through its territory next year. This was announced by Igor Dzomina, a spokesman for the Russian company Transneft.
“We have received a relevant letter from our Belarusian colleagues with a request to increase the tariff by 39%, arguing that they expect the volume of oil transported in their system to drop by half from next year.”
Belarus flag and oil wells
Through Belarus run mainly the Yamal-Europe pipelines and also, with its length of over 5,000 km, the world’s largest oil pipeline, the Druzhba. Druzhba starts in Russia on the eastern bank of the Volga River and divides into two branches in Belarus – the northern one leads to Poland and Germany and the southern one via Ukraine to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Because of its importance, Druzhba has also been exempted from the embargo on Russian oil imports to Europe, which is due to come into force on 5 December. We informed you about this in our recent article that Europe may now have more oil than it needs.
Ukraine also wants to increase fees
Ukraine is another country that wants to increase fees for oil transit through its territory from January. The increase of 18% to €13.6 per tonne is also expected to affect mainly oil transported through the Druzhba pipeline.
This information was given to Russia’s largest oil firm Transneft in a letter from Ukrtransnafta, the operator of the Ukrainian pipeline network.
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The latter wants to raise its price for a change because of the significant damage the Russians have done to the energy infrastructure in their sniping of Ukrainian territory.
This should mainly affect Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, but it is not yet clear what effect this will have on the final fuel prices in each country.
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