Saudi Aramco, SOMO Halt Crude Supplies to India’s Nayara Energy

NEW DELHI: Saudi Aramco and Iraq’s state oil marketer SOMO have stopped selling crude oil to India’s Nayara Energy following European Union sanctions imposed in July on the Russian-backed refiner, industry sources said.

The suspension of supplies by the two Gulf exporters has left Nayara, majority-owned by Russian entities including oil major Rosneft, dependent entirely on Moscow for crude imports in August, according to sources and shipping data from LSEG and Kpler.

Nayara usually imports around two million barrels of Iraqi crude and one million barrels of Saudi crude monthly but did not receive any cargoes from either supplier in August. Its last shipments were received in July, with a million barrels of Basra crude discharged at Vadinar port on July 29 and one million barrels of Arab Light on July 18, records showed.

Two sources noted that the EU sanctions created payment difficulties for Nayara’s purchases from SOMO, though they did not elaborate. Neither SOMO nor Nayara responded to requests for comment, while Aramco also declined to comment.

The company has continued to receive direct supplies from Rosneft, the Russian embassy in New Delhi confirmed last month. However, the sanctions have hindered its operations, forcing Nayara to run its 400,000-barrel-per-day Vadinar refinery in western India at 70–80 per cent of capacity, amid challenges in marketing refined products.

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Nayara, which accounts for about 8 per cent of India’s 5.2 million bpd refining capacity, has also struggled to ship fuels, increasingly relying on “dark fleet” vessels after mainstream shippers pulled back, industry trackers said.

The private refiner has seen turbulence in leadership as well. Its chief executive stepped down in July, and last week the company announced the appointment of a senior executive from Azerbaijan’s national oil company SOCAR as the new CEO.