A fleet of tankers filled with Russian fuel oil have anchored near Singapore and Malaysia, filling up Singapore anchorage.
About 1.1m tonnes of HSFO were being stored on vessels in the week ending October 24th, more than double the level a year ago, reported Vortexa.
Singapore is the world’s biggest ship-refuelling hub. It was noted that waters around Singapore, including near Malaysia’s Tanjung Pelepas port or the Johor Strait, were often used for ship-to-ship transfers of oil products or crude, and that this practice was often used to mask the origin of a cargo.
Vortexa noted for example that the Sagar Violet loaded fuel oil from Ust-Luga in Russia before unloading some of its cargo into another tanker called Parosea near Malaysia. The Parosea then transferred some fuel to Fortune Star, which is currently anchored near Tanjung Pelepas.
Roslan Khasawneh, a senior fuel oil analyst at Vortexa, said that nearly 65% of all Russian flows that have signaled Singapore as a destination have ended up in commercial floating storage tankers around Tanjung Pelepas over the past three months.
The influx of Russian flows to Asia of HSFO – used at sea by vessels equipped with scrubbers – has reduced profits from processing fuel oil to the lowest level in data compiled since 2018, according to Bloomberg Fair Value.
John Driscoll, founder and director of Singapore-based JTD Energy Services Pte Ltd, told Bloomberg that an increasing volume of oil and products were expected to flow toward Asia and be stored on tankers around Singapore and Malaysia as the December 5th deadline for EU sanctions approached.
