Petroleum pipeline systems and oil export status in Russia

By 2016, the total lengths of crude oil pipelines and product pipelines in Russia are 5.4×10⁴ km and 1.7×10⁴ km, respectively. In Russia, pipeline system undertakes nearly 90% of crude oil transportation, but its contribution to product oil transportation is quite behind the traditional railway transportation. In this paper, the operation and development of Russian petroleum pipeline system in the last ten years were analyzed, and the basic situations of several planned or underconstruction pipelines in Russia were mainly introduced in detail. It is shown that Russia, as the second largest crude oil exporter in the world, exported 2.54×10⁸ t crude oil in 2016 with year-on-year growth of 5.1%. Then, the export status, main export ways and oil importers of Russian crude oil were analyzed emphatically. And finally, combined with the future changes of crude oil demand from different regions in the world, the development trend of Russian crude oil export was forecasted. It is indicated that Europe is the traditional importer of Russian oil, but its import proportion has dropped continuously in recent ten years. The import proportion of Asia-Pacific market from Russia increases continuously. In the future, Russia will intensify the efforts on the exploitation of Asia-Pacific market.