Oil pipeline friendship

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The combine "Otto Grotewohl" in Böhlen started oil processing in 1967.

The friendship or Druzhba pipeline (after the Russian word Дружба , transliterated as Družba ) is a pipeline that extends from Almetjewsk in Tatarstan via Belarus and Poland to Schwedt / Oder ( northern strand ), which also includes the Total refinery in Spergau , a district of Leuna , supplied with oil.

The southern branch of the line branches off at Mazyr in Belarus and leads to the Czech Republic and on to Slovakia to Hungary.

The pipeline was built between 1959 and 1964 by the Comecon states at the time. It connects the Russian oil fields with the European refineries and has a transport capacity of 2.5 million barrels per day. The line was later extended further east to the West Siberian oil wells in Tyumen Oblast . This means that its length to the German border town of Schwedt reached 5327 kilometers. It is operated by the Transneft company or, in Belarus, by Gomel Transneft . The total length of the system is 8,900 km.

history

Oil production in the Soviet Union in 1962

At the 10th meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon) in December 1958 in Prague, the decision to build an oil pipeline was made. On July 17, 1963, the oil pipeline reached the EVW (oil processing plant, today's PCK refinery ) in Schwedt / Oder . Walter Ulbricht officially opened the line on December 18, 1963 .

Five years later the line was at its capacity limit, so the larger Družba-2 was planned with up to 1,220 millimeters and laid parallel to the old one in 1974. The last line in the GDR was put into operation in 1981.

Today's German customers are companies in Schwedt, Böhlen and Leuna . The oil from the Soviet Union was paid for via barter deals , while the GDR sold oil products made from it on the world market for foreign exchange. In the second half of the 1970s, as a result of the oil crisis , the Soviet Union increased the price of oil for its Eastern European customers, and in the early 1980s it even reduced the amount of crude oil from 19 to 17 million tons.

Development from 2000

In the so-called energy dispute between Russia and Belarus at the beginning of 2007 , the operator Transneft temporarily blocked the start of the pipeline on January 8, 2007 in order to force the Belarusians to abandon the planned transit tax to the West. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Germany were particularly affected by this among the crude oil customers. For the federal government this was another reason to reduce its dependency on Russia (one fifth of the demand), which has not yet ratified the Energy Charter of 1994 . After two days, Belarus withdrew the transit tax on Russian oil and the next morning Germany reached oil again through the pipeline. Utz Claassen , CEO of EnBW at the time , said: “This conflict over world market prices between Russia and Belarus has no noticeable effects on Germany. In contrast to gas, we have many alternative sources of supply and diverse storage and transport options for oil. "

Due to the 2013 potash dispute between Uralkali ( Russia ) and Belaruskali ( Belarus ) over the sudden dissolution of a cartel , Russia cut deliveries to the pipeline by a quarter (400,000 t), which was justified with maintenance work.

Deliveries were stopped in April 2019 because the limit values ​​for organic chloride were exceeded ten times. This is added to the oil production and must be filtered out again before transport.

course

Existing and planned oil pipelines in Europe

The oil pipeline transports oil from Russia via three lines to Western Europe. In Mazyr in Belarus , the line is divided into a northern and a southern section. The northern part runs through Poland to the vicinity of Schwedt to today's PCK refinery in Germany and consists of two parallel lines. The southern section is divided into the Ukraine , with one section going through Slovakia to the Czech Republic and the other section via Hungary connecting to the Adriatic pipeline . The northern section has a capacity of one million barrels per day and the southern section 1.2 million barrels per day.

use

The main German users of the pipeline are the PCK refinery in Schwedt and the Total refinery Mitteldeutschland in Leuna , which is connected to the friendship pipeline via a pipeline from the Schwedt mineral oil network. A total of around 22 million tons of West Siberian crude oil are transported to Schwedt every year .

According to Greenpeace, the route in Siberia is now in need of renovation, where considerable environmental pollution occurs again and again .

See also

literature

  • Roland Götz: Energy transit from Russia through Ukraine and Belarus. In: SWP study. December, 2006, ISSN  1611-6372 ( PDF )

Web links

Commons : Oil Pipeline Friendship  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The most important oil pipelines in Europe. In: mare . No. 67, April 2008, p. 30.
  2. ↑ a b Druzhba. Pipe manufacturer: Группа ЧТПЗ (ChelPipe Group), accessed on April 30, 2019 (English, Russian ).
  3. ↑ Pipeline dispute: Confusion over oil deliveries . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . January 10, 2007
  4. ^ Pipeline dispute: Russian oil reaches Germany . In: Spiegel Online , January 11, 2007
  5. ↑ Oliver Santen: BILD interview: What do we do without Russian oil, Mr. Claassen? . In: newspaper . January 9, 2007
  6. ↑ Kali dispute: Kremlin demands the release of Uralkali executives . In: Spiegel Online, August 30, 2013.
  7. ^ Potash dispute between Russia and Belarus escalates . In: FAZ.net , August 28, 2013.
  8. ↑ Andrey Gurkov: Kremlin and oil industry play down the Druzhba disaster. In: Deutsche Welle. June 4, 2019, accessed June 4, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Dörte Neitzel: Contaminated Crude Oil: Deliveries from Russia stopped. In: Technology + Purchasing. April 26, 2019, accessed April 30, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Bonjour TOTAL - Adieu Siberia: The oil company TOTAL is jointly responsible for the oil spill in the Russian oil production areas. Greenpeace, October 2004, accessed May 6, 2019 .