Russia’s oil deliveries to China via Kazakhstan have stayed essentially flat this year, according to data by Kazakhstan’s pipeline operator KazTransOil.
Between January and November this year, oil transit from Russia to China on KazTransOil’s network stood at 9,117,000 tons of oil, the company said on Friday in an overview of its export and transit oil deliveries for the first 11 months of the year.
The volume is slightly down, by 0.25%, compared to the 9,140,000 tons of Russian oil transit along this route in the same period of 2023, KazTransOil said.
In December 2024, KazTransOil is shipping a planned volume of 862,000 tons of oil from Russia to China, the company added.
Russia and Kazakhstan have discussed increasing Russian oil and gas flows to China via Kazakhstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a state visit to Astana last week.
“We have discussed the possibility of creating new routes for pumping our products – petroleum and gas alike – to third countries, primarily the People’s Republic of China, through the territory of Kazakhstan among other optional routes,” Putin said, as carried in the English translation of the Kremlin’s transcript of the briefing.
“These are very lucrative, exciting, and promising routes and projects. Without a doubt, they will help stabilise the global economy, primarily, in the Asia-Pacific region, and we will thus gain an extra opportunity to engage in market operations,” Putin was quoted as saying.
Russia’s gas giant Gazprom sees China as its key export market, now that it has shut off deliveries to most European countries.
Earlier this week, Gazprom said that its natural gas flows via the Power of Siberia pipeline to China had reached full capacity of 38 billion cubic meters annually.
Gazprom started sending gas to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline at the end of 2019, and flows have now reached the maximum design capacity.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com