Orlen Will No Longer Purchase Russian Oil Starting July

Polish refiner Orlen will not buy Russian oil for its Czech refinery after June 30, Chief Executive Ireneusz Fafara said on Monday.

The contract with Rosneft for Russian oil to be supplied to the Litvinov refinery in the Czech Republic was the last one linking Orlen to Russian oil, it said in a statement.

"We freed Central Europe from Russian oil today," Fafara told a news conference.

The Czech Republic had said in April that it had become fully independent of Russian oil supplies for the first time in its history following the completion of capacity upgrades on the TAL pipeline coming from the west.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Czech government has sought to end its partial dependence on the Druzhba pipeline, which has been delivering supplies from Russia for decades and has accounted for about half the country's annual oil imports.

At the end of last year Czech pipeline operator MERO completed an upgrade along the Transalpine (TAL) pipeline, which carries oil from tankers in the Italian port of Trieste to Germany, where it feeds into the Ingolstadt–Kralupy–Litvinov (IKL) pipeline to the Czech Republic.

Orlen said that currently, Czech refineries are supplied with crude oil from, among others, the North Sea and Mediterranean region, Saudi Arabia, South and North America, and Africa.

(Reuters)