Croatia’s sole pipeline operator, JANAF, has signed a two-year contract with Serbia’s NIS, majority owned by Russia’s Gazprom, for transporting crude oil to Serbia, despite previously announcing it would halt such transport as the EU tightened restrictions on Russian oil imports.
Under the deal, valid for 2023 and 2024, NIS reserved JANAF’s capacity for 6.2 million tonnes of crude, JANAF said in a statement on Wednesday.
“JANAF has once again proved to be a guarantee of energy security in our wider region. This also confirms that JANAF can provide safe supply to all users and in all market conditions,” the statement said.
Serbia – an EU candidate and one of the few European countries that have not joined the EU’s Russia sanctions – imports all of its oil from Russia, and about half of that is transported via JANAF.
Until recently, Serbia had feared that JANAF would stop transporting oil to Croatia’s eastern neighbour as the EU’s eighth package of sanctions imposed a ban on importing Russian crude oil. JANAF indeed announced earlier this year that it would stop transporting oil to Serbia, a move Belgrade criticised in October as a “political retaliation” and “a hostile gesture”.
JANAF also supplies some crude to Hungary, which has been pushing Croatia and the EU recently to set more favourable transit tariffs for the transport of oil that reaches the Adriatic in tankers and is then transported through JANAF.
Budapest has also asked Croatia to boost JANAF’s capacity, which Zagreb said was unnecessary as the pipeline’s current capacity can meet Hungary’s needs.
According to Croatian data, JANAF carried 2.3 million tonnes of crude to Hungary in 2021 but only 0.95 million this year, and Croatian officials say Budapest has not expressed any formal interest in using the pipeline’s full capacity.
Croatia’s Economy Minister, Davor Filipović, said earlier this week that JANAF’s “current capacity towards Hungary is 11.4 million tonnes of oil, while the refining capacity of the refinery in Hungary is 8.1 million tonnes”.
JANAF’s designed annual capacity is 34 million tonnes of crude oil, while the installed capacity is 20 million tonnes.
Hungary, for its part, accused Croatia of “extremely unfair behaviour”, calling it “an abuse of the war situation”.
(Zoran Radosavljević | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
