Russia’s crude and condensate production has increased in June by 5% to an average of 10.7 million barrels per day (bpd), Russian daily Kommersant reported on Wednesday, quoting sources familiar with the production numbers.
The production level includes condensate, which is not included in Russia’s quota in the OPEC+ deal but which the Russian authorities don’t report separately from crude production.
Russia is believed to be producing around 800,000 bpd-900,000 bpd of condensate.
The June level of Russia’s oil production is below the January-February level of around 11 million bpd, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the mass shunning of Russian crude oil in the West.
In June, Russia’s oil exports have fallen by 3.3%, while domestic refining demand is rising seasonally, according to Kommersant’s sources.
Experts told the Russian daily that it’s too early to talk about a steady decline in Russian oil exports.
In production, all Russian companies managed to stabilize their production from the declines in April and May, while Rosneft’s production even jumped by 15%, according to Kommersant’s sources. Operators with production sharing agreements continued to see a decline in output. At Sakhalin-1, for example, which U.S. supermajor Exxon said it would quit, output in June tumbled fivefold, Kommersant reports.
Earlier this month, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said that Russia was raising its oil production this month compared to May and expects to further boost output in July.
Russia is seeing a significant increase in its production so far this month compared to May, an increase of around 600,000 bpd, Novak said on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, as carried by Russian news agency TASS.
The Western sanctions, however, are hammering Russian oil production and exports, despite the fact that Russia is selling record volumes of crude to India these days.
Russia was already almost 1.3 million bpd below its target production in May, an OPEC+ document seen by Reuters showed this month.
In the near term, Russian oil output is set to decline by 18%—from 11.3 million bpd in the first quarter of 2022 to 9.3 million bpd in the final quarter of 2023 as a result of the EU embargo on both crude oil and refined product imports, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in early June.
NB: Charles Kennedy wrote this article for Oilprice.com
