The first naphtha cargo for Venezuela as part of an oil deal agreed between Caracas and Washington this month arrived on Friday in the country's waters in a tanker chartered by trading house Vitol, ship tracking data showed.
This month, after the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Caracas and Washington agreed to a flagship $2 billion oil supply deal to sell up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil in storage.
The agreement, which is giving traders Vitol and Trafigura initial access to Venezuela's oil for reselling to refiners worldwide, also includes the supply of much-needed heavy naphtha to dilute the OPEC country's extra-heavy oil output.
The United Kingdom-flagged tanker Hellespont Protector carrying some 460,000 barrels of US heavy naphtha, was approaching Venezuela's Jose port on Friday, according to the shipping data and documents from state company PDVSA seen by Reuters. It was scheduled to discharge there in the coming days.
PDVSA, which typically imports some 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of naphtha and light crude to dilute its heaviest crude output, had not received any naphtha cargoes since late December, the documents showed.
The last cargo was supplied last year by PDVSA's main joint venture partner, US Chevron, under US authorisation. Washington's strict blockade of all sanctioned vessels going in and out of the country's waters has stopped many suppliers, including Russia, from sending cargoes to Venezuela.
Last week, Venezuela began reversing oil output cuts it was forced to do in early January due to the blockade, but the reversal has not progressed much due to lack of diluents and a slow drain of its mounting crude inventories, industry sources said.
(Reporting by Marianna Parraga; Editing by Julia Symmes-Cobb and David Gregorio)
