Indian state-owned refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) has bought 2 million barrels of crude from Nigeria, trading sources told Reuters on Tuesday, as India looks to offset the loss of supply from the Middle East with deliveries from producers farther away.
HPCL has acquired Okwuibome and Utapate crudes from Nigeria from commodity trader Glencore via a tender, the sources told Reuters.
The Nigerian crude will go to feed HPCL’s refinery in the state of Rajasthan, HPCL Rajasthan Refinery Limited (HRRL), which has a capacity to process 180,000 barrels per day (bpd) and in which Hindustan Petroleum holds a 74% stake. The remaining stake is held by the state government of Rajasthan.
Since the beginning of the Iran war, Indian refiners have scrambled to replace the lost crude oil supply from the Middle East with alternatives from other producers.
Set OilPrice.com as a preferred source in Google .
India has significantly boosted its imports of Russian crude in recent months, with July imports hitting a new all-time high and accounting for more than half of total Indian crude oil imports.
But these aren’t enough and Indian refiners are looking for sources of supply that does not need to transit any of the chokepoints in the Middle East.
Indian refiners are in search of crude supply from as far as Angola in Africa and Venezuela in South America as their term supplies from the Middle East were trapped again in July and unable to reach India as planned.
Some of the biggest state-held refiners in India, the world’s third-largest crude oil importer, are looking for and testing new crude grades, to offset part of the supply lost to the Middle East conflict, senior refinery executives told Indian outlet Economic Times at the end of last month.
HPCL said it barely got any term supplies from the Middle East in the first quarter as cargoes were trapped in the Persian Gulf west of the Strait of Hormuz.
“This time in the first quarter, we hardly got anything from our term contracts because a lot of the term contracts were sitting on the other side of Strait of Hormuz,” HPCL managing director Vikas Kaushal told the Indian outlet.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com
- India Expands Oil Storage Sites After Shock Supply Disruption
- Pakistan Partners with Canadian Firm to Boost Domestic Heavy Crude Output
- Hormuz Tanker Traffic Stalls at Two-Month Low as Attacks Escalate
