MINSK, 24 June (BelTA) – OAO Gomeltransneft Druzhba will improve approaches to the safety of transportation taking into account the situation with deliveries of substandard oil from Russia. Gomeltransneft Druzhba Deputy Director General, Chief Engineer Andrei Verigo made the relevant statement in an interview with the journal of the Belarusian state petrochemical concern Belneftekhim, BelTA has learned.
When asked about the revision of the safety concept with regard to oil transportation, Andrei Verigo said: “On the whole, our safety practices will remain the same. We are just going to perfect them in order to reduce the time of response to off-nominal situations. We should reach a new safety level, which will totally rule out situations like the one that happened in April [oil in the Druzhba pipeline was polluted with organic chlorides].”
The executive reminded that on 19 April once the batch of substandard oil was detected, the Belarusian side informed the Russian side as well as other partners right away. “But Russia didn't stop oil pumping. European operators couldn't assess the scale of the oncoming tragedy and possible consequences right away either. In other words, the reporting system did well but the response system malfunctioned. As a result, the delivery of polluted oil had negative consequences for expensive equipment of oil refineries, resulted in lengthy downtime of the pipeline transport system and will entail a considerable decrease in the volume of transportation later on. The situation is unprecedented. The economies of a number of countries have suffered colossal damage,” Andrei Verigo noted.
In his opinion, from now on actions of the transport company in such cases should be simple and understandable: cut off the flow. “It is a matter of safety of the entire transnational system. Polluted oil was pumped for five days while we will need two months to remove it because the maximum speed of the reverse flow is four times lower than what we're accustomed to,” Andrei Verigo explained. “Even according to evaluations of Russian experts, PAO Transneft will need at least eight months to clean its pipelines. Only then will the Druzhba oil pipeline system be able to reach the designed throughput capacity.”
