MOSCOW/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Russia has shipped its first naphtha cargo to Vietnam, as it looks for new buyers to support sales hit by Western sanctions, data from traders and shipbrokers showed.
According to LSEG and Vortexa shipping data, the Malta-flagged tanker Northernlight loaded around 60,000 metric tons of naphtha in the Russian Baltic port of Vysotsk on June, 23 and delivered its cargo at Van Phong terminal in Vietnam’s Khanh Hoa province.
Nguyen Tran Trung, CEO of Van Phong terminal, on Friday confirmed the arrival of the cargo, and said owner of the cargo has since shipped the naphtha out of Vietnam.
“We are operating as a customs warehouse and the cargo is not imported into Vietnam,” Trung told Reuters in a telephone call.
He declined to provide the next destination of the cargo or the name of the owner of the cargo.
The tanker discharged up to 27,000 tons of naphtha at Khanh Hoa, one of the sources said, adding that the terminal mostly consists of bonded storage tanks.
According to LSEG and Vortexa data, after the Vietnam stop the Northernlight is heading to Chinese port of Dalian to discharge the rest of its cargo. At least 15,000 tons of the petrochemical feedstock is heading there, one shipbroking source said.
Since the European Union’s full embargo on Russian oil products went into effect in February 2023, countries in the Middle East and Asia have become the main destinations for Russia’s naphtha supplies.
Naphtha is a primary feedstock in the petrochemical industry for producing olefins and aromatics, which are then used to manufacture a wide array of products, including plastics, synthetics, and various other chemicals, and also used for gasoline blending.
Russia doesn’t supply oil to Vietnam, despite active cooperation in the oil industry between state companies. The only test supply was back in 2015, when a cargo of ESPO was shipped to Dung Quat refinery.
(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow, Trixie Yap in Singapore, Additional reporting by Khanh Vu in Vietnam;Editing by Kim Coghill and Lincoln Feast.)
