BPCL has bought its first cargo of Kazakh ultra-light CPC Blend crude, as well as Nigerian and Abu Dhabi grades for July, a company source said on Monday.
SINGAPORE: India's state-run refiner Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (BPCL) has bought its first cargo of Kazakh ultra-light CPC Blend crude, as well as Nigerian and Abu Dhabi grades for July, a company source said on Monday.
In a tender that was awarded late on Friday, BPCL bought a one-million-barrel cargo of CPC Blend from Japanese trading house Mitsubishi for loading in June, plus one million barrels of Nigerian Erha from trader Glencore and another 500,000 barrels of Umm Shaif from oil major BP, the source said.
Price details were not immediately available.
The news follows several months in which Indian refiners, normally steady buyers of low-sulphur Nigerian crudes, have broadened their slates to include more Caspian grades to reduce their dependency on Africa and take advantage of lower prices.
While premiums for West African and Asia-Pacific sweet crudes have soared to record heights this year due to disruptions, Asian naphtha strength and US gasoline demand, differentials for Caspian crude flowing into the Mediterranean have been capped by the rising supply via the new Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.
That has spurred BPCL and peers like Indian Oil Corp (IOC) to increase their intake of these grades, especially Azeri Light, with IOC buying an unusually large 3 million barrels of the grade in a tender awarded last week for June loading.
In BPCL's previous tender for June-loading crude, it bought one million barrels of Azerbaijan Azeri Light crude from Japanese trader Mitsui, plus 500,000 barrels of Yemeni Masila crude from Canadian trader Nexen and 500,000 barrels of Dubai from Phibro.
BPCL operates a 240,000 bpd refinery in Mumbai as well as its 150,000 bpd refinery in the southern Indian state of Kerala, run by subsidiary Kochi Refineries Ltd. It also owns a majority stake in a 60,000 bpd refinery in northeast India.
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