The Caspian Pipeline Consortium said two tankers, the ASIA and the NISSOS IOS, were attacked during loading operations at its Yuzhnaya Ozereevka marine terminal on the Russian Black Sea coast on Sunday. The ASIA caught fire, which was extinguished, and the consortium said there were no injuries and no oil spill. Both vessels remained afloat.
CPC suspended crude loadings at the terminal pending a full assessment of the damage. Kazakhstan's energy ministry said the two Single Point Mooring facilities involved, SPM 1 and SPM 3, were not damaged, but no timeline was given for a restart of loadings.
Neither the consortium nor Russian officials identified who carried out the strike. The attack lands in the middle of a sharp escalation of drone and missile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine over shipping in the Black and Azov seas in the past week.
Kazakhstan's foreign ministry condemned the recent attacks on tankers moving crude through the CPC system and said Astana was conducting a comprehensive damage assessment. It added that Kazakhstan reserves all rights under international law, including seeking full compensation for damage.
The CPC pipeline runs 940 miles from Kazakhstan's Caspian oil fields to Novorossiysk and accounts for roughly 80% of Kazakh crude exports. Any prolonged outage at the Black Sea terminal would force Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the other Tengiz and Kashagan shareholders to seek alternative routes and would tighten the medium sour barrels that European refiners rely on from the region.