Railway Collapse in Russia Sparks Gasoline Shortage
- 13.02.2025, 14:23
Oil companies are warned.
The transport collapse continues to worsen on the Russian Railways network, which has been hit by sanctions, war, and an attempt to divert trade flows towards China.
According to Kommersant, the largest oil companies have warned of the threat of disruption to fuel supplies to the domestic market due to problems with traffic management at Russian Railways, which are unable to cope with the dispatch of tank cars loaded with oil products.
RN-Trans, which is part of Rosneft, reported in a letter to top managers of Russian Railways that half of the fuel produced at the Samara group of oil refineries (47%) was not accepted for transportation, as a result of which 498 loaded tank cars were idle at the end of January. More than 40% of shipments, or about 700 tank cars, could not be sent by Angarsk Petrochemical Company (ANKhK) - this creates "risks of disruption" of deliveries to Far Eastern ports for export and "may significantly affect the work of PJSC Rosneft," Kommersant quotes the company's letter to Russian Railways.
Gazprom Neft estimates the volume of stuck oil products at 396.9 thousand tons, of which two-thirds - 242.9 thousand tons - are intended for consumption within Russia. This creates "threats of disruption of state tasks for the supply of oil products to the domestic market" and may force "unloading of oil refineries," the company's letter says.
The war brought problems to Russian Railways, sources close to the company told Reuters. Due to large-scale transportation for the army, the Russian railway network - the third longest in the world — plunged into chaos with thousands of abandoned trains and traffic jams. "The system worked fine, but everything has changed - cargo goes to the east, and the defence industry gets priority, and the railways can't cope," the source said.
The average technical speed of freight trains on the Russian Railways network last year fell to 40.6 km/h - the lowest value since 1960. And the average section speed, which includes time spent on stops, fell to 35.7 km/h, which was the minimum since 1993.
Because of traffic jams on the railway network last year, importers did not receive 80 million tons of cargo — a quarter of the goods that were purchased in Asia through Far Eastern ports. Coal companies' plans to export to China were disrupted, and several hundred thousand tons of unexported products have accumulated at Rusal's aluminum plants in Siberia, top managers of large companies told Bloomberg.
According to a Reuters source, sanctions have caused a shortage of spare parts on the railway, while mobilization and recruitment for the war have led to a shortage of personnel. "They (the drivers) either went to the North Military District or to the military industry, and there is simply no one to drive the trains," the agency's source said.