Oil exports via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium's network are expected to rise 18 per cent to 74.4 million tonnes this year, Nikolai Tokarev, head of Russia's pipeline monopoly Transneft, told the company's in-house magazine on Tuesday.
CPC, which counts US oil majors Chevron and ExxonMobil among its shareholders, handles more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan’s oil exports, linking the Tengiz field and other deposits to a Russian Black Sea terminal at Yuzhnaya Ozereevka near Novorossiysk.
Exports via the CPC's 1,500-kilometre pipeline were curtailed after a Ukrainian drone strike damaged part of its loading infrastructure on November 29.
Currently, only one of three moorings is deployed in exporting operations, while the consortium has been struggling to return a spare mooring to service due to unfavourable weather, industry sources said.
"Unfortunately, Russia’s energy infrastructure facilities, including the CPC, remain under threat of terrorist attacks. And this is despite the fact that the CPC's shareholders include the largest international oil companies," Tokarev said.
"At the same time, the consortium's operational performance is positive, with a significant increase in throughput," he added.
Due to the constrained export capacity, Kazakhstan has had to divert some of its oil to other routes, such as a pipeline to China and the Baku - Tbilisi - Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, and has revised down its 2026 oil output outlook.
CPC, which accounts for one per cent of global crude supply, shipped more than 65.5 million tonnes of oil from January to November 21.
Two industry sources told Reuters last week that CPC plans to slightly reduce CPC Blend crude exports in January to around 1.65 million barrels per day from the 1.7 million bpd scheduled for December.
(Reporting by Marina Bobrova and Olesya Astakhova; writing by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Kirsten Donovan)