Kazakhstan Announces Rationing Oil Exports to Germany

In October 2024, Kazakhstan, the largest and most economically developed of the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, “will reduce oil exports to Germany from 145,000 to 133,000 tons.” As Kazakhstan’s Energy Ministry has stated, exports to Europe after the inevitable passing through Russia will be reduced. In a straight line, Kazakhstan (map below the article), with a territory 7.6 times larger than Germany’s, is more than 4300 kilometers from Germany, with the Caspian Sea in between, and needs to ask for help from Russia. Kazakhstan is connected to the Russian oil pipeline system, and in order to “export” its crude oil to Europe, it must rely on the “goodwill” of the Kremlin.

In technical terms, the announced reduction in crude oil supplies concerns the Druzhba pipeline, built between 1960 and 1964 to supply Soviet oil to the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (map at left). Kazakhstan’s oil export route starts from the town of Uzen, arrives at a sorting center in Samara, Russia (attacked for months by Ukrainian kamikaze drones, also built thanks to German funding), and from there arrives through a system of oil pipelines operated by the Russian public company Transneft to a sorting center in Adam Zastava, Poland.

Thanks to Moscow’s accessibility, Kazakhstan exported more than one million tons of crude oil to Europe in the first nine months of 2024, 1,081,000 tons of oil, almost double the volumes delivered to Germany and other European consumers in the same period last year (590,000 tons). Kazinform news agency explained that “the reduction in supplies is related to the start of technical works at the Kashagan field in the Caspian Sea.” Sources in Astana do not rule out that forced rationing may affect Kazakhstan’s oil exports in the last two months of the year as well. There are also allegations that Ukrainian attacks hit one of the oil facilities in Samara, causing problems with the transportation of Kazakh oil.

This statement will render speechless the German industry, which even asked Kazakhstan to “increase oil supplies to 2.5 million tons per year.”

Kazakhstan’s oil company KazTransOil is seeking transportation alternatives, including a route across the Caspian Sea from the port of Aktau to the terminals of the 1768-kilometer Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, which connects Azerbaijan to Georgia and Turkey, and then to the Balkan countries (map at left). Between January and September 2024, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (another major oil-producing country) exported about 1.1 million tons of oil to Europe through the BTC pipeline, which has a capacity of more than 50 million tons of crude oil per year.