OREANDA-NEWS. Tanker Atlantas, carrying 2 million barrels of Iranian oil for LOTOS, has just reached the Danish Straits. A challenging ship-to-ship transfer of a portion of the cargo to a smaller vessel is about to start.  Both tankers are expected to arrive in Gdansk around August 14th.

Based on a contract between Grupa LOTOS S.A. and National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Atlantas is heading to Naftoport in Gda?sk. The contract is the result of LOTOS’s efforts to ensure higher diversification of supply sources of strategic raw materials and increase Poland’s energy security.

Given the depths of the Danish Straits, which limit tanker’s maximum permitted draught to 15 metres, before entering the Baltic, Atlantas will have to load around 700,000 barrels to a smaller vessel.

Atlantas left Iran’s Kharg Island terminal at the end of June 2016. So far, it has covered 12,000 nautical miles, going around Africa along the way, as the draught of vessels of that class, when loaded, is too large to use the Suez Canal.

Grupa LOTOS S.A. began cooperation with NIOC and arranged for the delivery after the international sanctions on Iran’s oil trade were lifted. 

It is worth to note that the Gda?sk refinery was originally designed to process Middle East crudes. In the 1980s and 1990s it processed a total of some 75 million barrels (over 10 million tonnes) of Iranian oil