“Russia’s oil and petrochemical products transportation market” conference completes work

The 10th conference dedicated to the problems of oil and petrochemical products’ deliveries has completed its work in Moscow. Despite long history of the event the considered issues are still attract a lot of attention. The audience of the conference was represented by governmental officials, RZD ( Russian railways), transportation companies, operators, railcars builders and transportation analysts.

All the analysts and market representatives spoke about the surplus of railcars to deliver oil products. The speakers claimed that this surplus would enable the creation of efficient schemes to bind RZD to exchange and OTC sales. The representative of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) said the Service had initiated changes relating to equal access of companies to railways as well as inclusion of RZD in to a loop of OTC oil products trade as a transportation monopoly. “We need a transportation indicator,” the FAS official said.

Transportation of oil and petrochemical products by rail to north-bound sea terminals and ports was in the focus of one of the sessions at the conference. These ports and terminals belong to the so-called Arctic transportation cluster. The management of the terminals reported about their ports’ advantages as well as plans to improve the work with RZD in a bid to boost efficiency of oil products’ rail deliveries to terminals and their timely loading. Some of experts outlined the necessity to provide transparent and accurate tariff for new terminals and ports.

RZD top manager and his peer at STFO (an RZD body in charge of transportation services and tariffs) provided an outlook of the rail deliveries for oil and oil products. Responding to companies’ complains about current bottle necks in railways the officials said that it was due to maintenance. They backed the idea and first experiments in creation a network between ports and railways and called for reduction of empty railcars while recommending boosting their capacity.

The call was mainly addressed to railcars producers who also participated in discussions. The last session of the event was completely dedicated to railcars issues: cleaning, production, technologies. The audience also highlighted the advantages of tank-containers use in oil products’ deliveries. Though the market share of tank-containers is not large their future is seen very prospective, the experts claimed.

We hope to see our regular and new participants next year at our conference.

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