- Germany denied a claim that it plans to buy Russian pipeline oil in 2023 and said it will instead look to Kazakhstan.
- A Russian pipeline operator said it had received requests from Germany for supplies in 2023.
A Russian oil pipeline operator said that it received requests from Germany for first-quarter crude deliveries, but Berlin denied that claim and backed plans to pivot to Kazakhstan, according to a Tuesday Bloomberg report.
The European Union banned imports of Russian seaborne crude on December 5, but didn't ban supplies delivered by pipeline. Still, Germany and Poland previously have said they would halt imports of Russian pipeline crude by the end of this year.
In a Tuesday interview with state-owned media, Transneft CEO Nikolay Tokarev maintained that both Poland and Germany had put in requests for Russian oil supplies, and that it would pose a challenge for German refiners to replace all Russian volumes with Kazakh oil.
"Reports that Germany had ordered Russian crude oil are false," a spokesperson for Germany's economy ministry said, per the Bloomberg report.
The German refineries Leuna and Schwedt have long relied on piped Russian oil supplies from the Druzba pipeline, Europe's largest crude oil conduit. Berlin's aim moving forward is to pivot to Kazakhstan for oil, but an agreement has yet to been finalized.
"The mineral oil companies at the Leuna and Schwedt refineries will no longer be ordering Russian crude oil in the new year," the German spokesperson said, per Bloomberg, noting that the PCK refinery in Schwedt has reserved capacities for Kazakh oil in the pipeline system.