A Black Sea storm left half a million people without power in Crimea and halted crude loadings at Russia’s Novorossiysk and the CPC terminal, leading to an oil-production drop in Kazakhstan, according to Bloomberg.
Authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea declared Monday a non-working day as the storm reaching wind speeds of 40 meters per second continued to batter the peninsula. Other areas of Ukraine and southern Russia were also affected.
The oil terminal of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium on Russia’s Black Sea coast and the nearby Novorossiysk oil terminal temporarily stopped crude loadings because of the storm, their operators said in separate statements Monday.
Russia’s oil-pipeline operator Transneft PJSC that runs the Novorossiysk facility said loadings may resume temporarily on Tuesday if the weather improves in the storm that’s expected to last most of this week.
With crude reservoirs at the terminal nearly full, the CPC has been accepting oil from producers at a reduced rate, its statement said.
Kazakhstan, which uses CPC for the bulk of its seaborne crude exports, has had to cut production. The nation’s oil output on November 26 dropped to 214,500 tons a day (around 1.57 million barrels a day), down more than 15% on the day before, according to the central Asian nation’s energy ministry.
Ukraine’s state emergency service reported that heavy snow forced the closure of main roads in the southern Odesa and Mykolayiv regions. Some 234 towns and villages in Odesa region experienced power cuts, according to Governor Oleh Kiper, while Poltava region in central Ukraine reported 18,000 were affected by outages.