© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Firefighters extinguish oil tanks at a storage facility that local authorities say caught fire after the military brought down a Ukrainian drone, in the town of Klintsy in the Bryansk Region, Russia January 19, 2024, in this still image taken
(Reuters) -Russia’s energy infrastructure has been hit by drone attacks and fires in the past month, adding to uncertainty in global oil and gas markets already rocked by the conflict in the Middle East.
Russia and Ukraine have targeted each other’s energy infrastructure in strikes designed to disrupt supply lines and logistics and to demoralise each other as they bid to get the edge in a nearly two-year-old war that shows no sign of ending.
Following are recent major incidents at Russian oil facilities over the past months:
* A Russian appointed official said on Jan. 18 that Ukraine had tried and failed to target a Russian Baltic Sea oil terminal with a drone. Ukraine said it had hit targets in St Petersburg with domestic-made drone.
Mikhail Skigin, a co-owner of the St Petersburg Oil Terminal, told RBC media that the air defence had thwarted a “monstrous catastrophe”, which could lead to human losses and ecological damage to the Baltic Sea.
* Four oil tanks at a large storage facility in the town of Klintsy in Russia’s western Bryansk region caught fire on Jan. 19 after the military brought down a Ukrainian strike drone, the regional governor said. A spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency neither confirmed nor denied Ukraine’s involvement.
* A fire tore through Ryazan oil refinery, Russia’s third-largest, on Jan 19, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said, quoting emergency services.
* Russian energy giant Novatek on Jan. 21 was forced to suspend some operations at the huge Baltic Sea fuel export terminal at Ust-luga as well as “technological processes” at a nearby fuel-producing complex due to a fire, started by what Ukrainian media said was a drone attack.
Russia will likely cut exports of naphtha by some 127,500-136,000 barrels per day, or around a third of its total exports, after fires disrupted operations at refineries on the Baltic and Black Seas, according to traders and LSEG ship-tracking data.
* Rosneft’s Tuapse oil refinery in southern Russia halted oil processing and output on Jan. 26 following a fire, two industry sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. A Ukrainian source said Ukrainian drones attacked the refinery on the shores of the Black Sea.
* Lukoil has halted a unit at NORSI, Russia’s fourth largest refinery, located near the city of Nizhny Novgorod, some 430 km (270 miles) east of Moscow, after an “incident”. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Jan. 27 that repair work would take at least a month or a month and a half.
* Russian air defences thwarted a drone attack on Jan. 29 on the Slavneft-YANOS oil refinery in the city of Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, regional governor Mikhail Yevrayev said.
* Two Ukrainian attack drones struck the largest oil refinery in the country’s south on Saturday, Feb. 3, a source in Kyiv told Reuters, the latest in a series of long-range attacks on Russian oil facilities which has reduced Russia’s exports of naphtha, a petrochemical feedstock.
Russia’s second-largest oil producer Lukoil, which owns the 300,000 bpd Volgograd refinery, later said the plant was working as normal.
* A fire broke out at the Ilsky oil refinery in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region and was extinguished in about two hours, regional authorities said on Feb. 9, but gave no details of what caused the fire or its impact on the refinery’s output.
The Ilsky refinery is one of the main fuel producers in southern Russia, with a capacity to refine 6.6 million tonnes of crude a year.
The refinery plans to resume operations at its damaged primary processing unit this week, according to sources.
A Ukrainian source told Reuters that the drone attack was behind the fire. Drones also attacked the nearby Afipsky oil refinery, but the results of that operation were still being determined, the source added. There was no comment from Russia on an Afipsky attack.
* A Ukrainian drone attacked an oil storage depot in Russia’s Kursk region on Feb. 15, sparking a fire at the facility, the local governor said.
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