India’s Reliance Industries, the top private refiner in the country, has bought 1 million barrels of crude from Kuwait, trade sources told Reuters on Tuesday, as most Indian refiners halt purchases from Russia after the U.S. sanctions on the top Russian oil producers and exporters.
Reliance Industries of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani has bought the Kuwaiti crude via a tender issued last week by the national Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), according to Reuters’ sources.
KPC sought buyers in a tender for 500,000 barrels of Kuwait Heavy and 500,000 barrels of Eocene crude after Kuwait’s Al-Zour refinery couldn’t process these volumes due to unplanned maintenance following a fire.
The Kuwait Heavy and Eocene cargoes are loading between December 6 and 9 and were awarded to Reliance Industries, Reuters’ sources said.
Reliance has been a major buyer of crude from the Middle East and Russia in recent years. After the U.S. sanctions on Russia’s top oil firms Rosneft and Lukoil last month, the Indian refiner snapped up millions of barrels of crude from the Middle East as it said it would comply with the Trump Administration’s sanctions.
Reliance, which operates the world’s biggest refinery complex at Jamnagar with 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd) of processing capacity, has a long-term deal with Rosneft to buy almost 500,000 bpd. Reliance was India’s single biggest buyer of Russian crude, until now.
Reliance typically does not import crude from sanctioned entities and is unlikely to risk secondary U.S. sanctions by continuing imports from Rosneft, as the Indian conglomerate is a listed entity with access to the U.S. banking system, sources familiar with the company told the Financial Times at the time.
Even before the U.S. sanctions were announced, Reliance had accelerated crude oil purchases from the Middle East and had been more active than usual in procuring oil from the Gulf region.
All but two Indian refiners have skipped placing orders for Russian crude for December after the U.S. sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil, sources with knowledge of the purchases told Bloomberg last week.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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