Primary oil processing at Rosneft’s Novokuibyshevsk refinery has been halted. The outage, which began on April 18 after a Ukrainian drone strike, encompasses the first stage of crude processing at one of Russia’s refineries in the Samara region, two sources told Reuters on Tuesday.
The outage follows attacks reported on Saturday by Samara region governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, who said the Novokuibyshevsk and Syzran refineries had been targeted. The Novokuibyshevsk plant is operated by Rosneft and processed 5.74 million metric tons (115,000 bpd) of crude in 2024, according to Reuters industry sources.
The refinery produced 1.10 million tons of gasoline last year, 1.64 million tons of diesel fuel, and 1.27 million tons of fuel oil, according to the same sources. With primary processing halted, the disruption is not limited to one product stream. If crude distillation is down, the refinery cannot run normally.
That is the immediate issue for Russia’s downstream system. Moscow is not short of crude production. The problem is what happens when a refinery cannot take crude in and turn it into gasoline, diesel and other products. In past refinery outages, barrels that could not be processed domestically were redirected toward export markets instead.
That already happened at Novokuibyshevsk before. Last year, Ukrainian strikes on Novokuibyshevsk and other Rosneft refineries forced Russia to reroute excess crude to western export ports as domestic processing capacity fell. That shift helped support crude exports while tightening the domestic fuel balance.
The latest outage comes as Russia’s oil revenues remain elevated. Figures cited by RFE/RL showed Russian export revenues from crude and refined products rose to $19 billion in March from $9.7 billion in February as global prices climbed. At the same time, Washington extended a sanctions waiver allowing Russian crude sales to Indian refiners through mid-May, preserving a major outlet for Russian barrels.
No restart timeline for Novokuibyshevsk has been disclosed.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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