Maintenance work on single point mooring three (SPM-3) at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium's Russian Black Sea terminal is in its final stages, the CPC said on Wednesday, and it is preparing to dismantle another SPM damaged by a Ukrainian naval drone.
SPM-3 has been under planned maintenance since the middle of November, while a drone attack on SPM-2 in late November prompted a bottleneck in exports that has led to a steep fall in oil production and exports from Kazakhstan.
The CPC terminal handles around 1.5 per cent of global oil or 80 per cent of total crude oil exports from Kazakhstan.
There are three SPMs, or floating buoys located some five kilometres (3.1 miles) from the shore at the Yuzhnaya Ozereevka CPC terminal near the port of Novorossiysk, which are able to load oil onto tankers.
Two of the SPMs are usually engaged in loadings operations, while one is used as a backup.
"Special attention was paid to the final activities involved in repairing the CPC's single point mooring SPM-3," the CPC said in a statement.
"Since mid-November 2025, in challenging weather conditions, partial replacement of the subsea hoses and subsea loading arms of the cargo system has been carried out at the facility," it said.
SPM-2 remains offline following significant damage from a Ukrainian naval drone attack on November 29. The CPC said on Tuesday it had concluded that SPM-2 was beyond repair and that it would need to be dismantled and replaced.
According to industry sources, oil exports via CPC dropped by 24 per cent in December from the previous month after drone attacks, while Kazakhstan's crude production fell by 35 per cent in the first 12 days of January.
Shareholders in CPC's 1,500-kilometre (930-mile) pipeline include Kazakhstan's state-owned oil company Kazmunaygas, Russia's Lukoil and units of US oil giants Chevron and ExxonMobil.
Kazakhstan redirected 300,000 tonnes of oil away from the CPC in December, Kazmunaygas said on Friday.
Separately, unidentified drones struck at least two oil tankers in the Black Sea last week, including one chartered by Chevron, as they sailed towards the terminal.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin Editing by Andrew Osborn)