Singapore: According to the report of traders and shipping, One of the shipping units of France’s TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA) has provisionally chartered a tanker to load Abu Dhabi crude in early May for Europe; this is the first such shipment in two years. 

CSSSA, TotalEnergies’ shipping arm, chartered the Suezmax tanker Moscow Spirit to load 1 million barrels of Murban crude from the port of Jebel Dhanna in the United Arab Emirates for Britain on May 1-3 at a world scale rate of 60 points, the shipping report showed.

The crude of Abu Dhabi’s Das was last loaded for Italy some two years back in 2020, as per the data revealed by Refinitiv Eikon. 

The arbitrage window for Middle East crude to head to Europe opened after European buyers ignored Russian oil following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; it is called “a special operation”.

More loads of Abu Dhabi crude grades: Murban, Das and Upper Zakum are anticipated to head to Europe in some months to replace Russia as the European Union prepares more sanctions on Russian oil imports, said traders and also added that maybe they divert some of their supplies away from Asia. 

According to one of the traders that the global trade flow is “readjusting” in order to reflect changes in Russian oil supplies. 

Russia, Europe’s biggest oil supplier, will provide 26% of European Union (EU) imported oil in 2020.

Abu Dhabi contains 95% of the oil and 92% of the natural gas resources of the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates holds 97,800,000,000 barrels of proven oil reserves as of 2016, ranking 7th in the world and accounting for about 5.9% of the world’s total oil reserves of 1,650,585,140,000 barrels.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Arabic: شركة بترول أبوظبي الوطنية) or ADNOC is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is the world’s 12th largest oil company by production.