OREANDA-NEWS. Russian companies continue to lose revenues due to the dirty oil incident in the Druzhba pipeline, despite the resumption of supply. Analysts from Argus and Reuters price agencies told the Russian media about this.

Reported losses in the sale of oil in the port of Ust-Luga. Here, the content of organochlorine compounds, which the oil pipeline turned out to be contaminated in April, returned to the framework established in standard - no more than 10 ppm (from July 1, the limit level dropped to 6 ppm). According to Argus, historically, the level of organochlorine in Russian oil at Ust-Luga was 1–2 ppm, and now it reaches 4 ppm. “But one thing is the standard, and the other is the level of 1–1.5 ppm, which the market is used to. Many plants in the Mediterranean fundamentally do not take oil with an organochlorine content above 1.5 ppm”, explained Gleb Gorodjankin, a Reuters expert.

As a result, in May, the discount on formally clean oil in Ust-Luga to prices in the port of Primorsk was from $ 0.85 to $ 3 per barrel (1–4%), with two batches of 100 thousand tons each being sold at a discount of $ 7–10 per a barrel, said Victor Parno, Argus Vice President for Business Development in Russia, the CIS countries and the Baltic States.

Estimates of pollution of Russian oil vary: Polish Pern said that the level of organochlorine was 300 ppm, in Gomeltransoil Druzhba they talked about exceeding the norm tenfold. To bring 1.3 million tons of dirty oil to the standard, depending on the level of pollution, it may be necessary from 14 million to 76.5 million tons of pure oil, Andrei Kostin, director of the Rupec information and analysis center, estimated. If the discount on this oil doesn't change, remaining at the level of early June ($ 0.1 to $ 0.3 per barrel), oil companies may lose another $ 15–84 million, Polishchuk says.