Contaminated Crude Oil Hits European Oil & Gas Companies

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--A number of leading European oil and gas companies were forced to take emergency measures over the past week due to the discovery of contaminated crude oil shipments from Azerbaijan.

BP plc (London, England) confirmed that it had noted contamination in some shipments related to the presence of corrosive organic chlorides, which can damage equipment and refineries in quantity. As operator of the 1,800-kilometer (km) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline that links Azerbaijan's oilfields to the Ceyhan terminal in Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea, the BTC Pipeline Company, which is operated by a consortium led by BP, declared "force majeure" on its Azeri crude exports from the Ceyhan terminal following the discovery of contamination in the pipeline system and the storage tanks. The implementation of additional checks has led to delays in shipments from Ceyhan to other European refineries. In response to queries from Azeri Press Agency, Tamam Bayatlı, head of the press service of BP-Azerbaijan said: "BTC continues to take all necessary measures to completely resolve the issue. BTC continues comprehensive assessment work, and within this framework, the quality of crude oil is checked before each loading operation at the Ceyhan terminal."

A statement from BTC seen by Platts stated that a number of shippers noted higher-than-acceptable levels of organic chlorides for transportation, which had impacted BTC's transportation and non-transportation services. Shortly after BP's findings, Italy's Eni SpA (Rome, Italy) reported that it had bought some of the contaminated cargoes and that some had entered its refining operations. Austrian energy group OMV (Vienna) also confirmed organic chloride contamination in Azeri crude cargoes but stopped it reaching its refineries. OMV said it had secured alternative crude from other sources to "ensure continuity and security of fuel supply." It explained that the organic chlorides are typically used in the industry to boost oil extraction from fields by cleaning oil wells but that the compounds have to be removed before oil enters the pipelines.

In Romania, the Energy Ministry declared a state of emergency to allow OMV Petrom (Bucharest) to tap into emergency reserves of crude oil and diesel to keep the Petrobrazi refinery operating, following the non-delivery of a contaminated cargo from Ceyhan. Roughly 80,000 tons of crude oil and 30,000 tons of diesel from the emergency stocks were released and the company has two months to refill the reserves. In the Czech Republic, Azeri contaminated crude oil was reported by Orlen Unipetrol (Prague) and the State Material Reserves Department (ASMR). "In cooperation with Mero, we will store contaminated crude oil with a volume of almost 60,000 cubic meters at the central oil depot in Nelakhozeves and in storage tanks at the refinery in Kralupy nad Vltava," said Orlen Unipetrol representative, Pavel Kaidl, in a EurAsia report. "Subsequently, this oil will be gradually and in a precisely defined proportion mixed with other batches and then safely processed."

In a recent OPEC report, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are expected to play an increasingly important role in the supply of oil to Europe, particularly in light on the European Union's (EU's) complete sanctions on Russian oil. OPEC's opinion is that it is unlikely that Russian oil shipments to Europe will ever recover to the levels recorded before the outbreak of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, reinforcing the long-term importance of supplies from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Eurostat data shows that EU countries imported 17.272 million tonnes of oil from Azerbaijan in 2024, down 14.9% compared to 2023, and worth more than 10.2 billion euros (US$11.9 billion).

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