March 23, 2020 [The Baltic Course] – Lithuania’s oil handling company Klaipedos Nafta (Klaipeda Oil) says it has taken additional technical measures to free up its storage facilities after a second tanker with crude oil for Belarus arrived in Klaipeda on Friday, writes LETA/BNS.

Meanwhile, Lithuania’s state-owned railway company Lietuvos Gelezinkeliai (Lithuanian Railways, LG) says it has taken steps to speed up the transportation of the oil.

“In fact, we had to look for additional solutions to accept two tankers in a week and to be able to handle oil as fast as possible. We have found technical solutions and have increased the number of filled railcars to empty our storage facilities faster,” Darius Silenskis, CEO of Klaipedos Nafta, told LETA/BNS.

LG also told on Friday the company is increasing its freight transportation capacity.

“We form longer trains of up 240 railcars. We have plenty of railcars as we are ready to increase our capacity, if necessary,” Martynas Burba, spokesman for the railway company, said.

It will take around a week to transport the crude oil brought in by the latest tanker and the one that arrived earlier this week to Belarus.

“We transport around 14,000 tons of oil per day, which is in fact double of what we had before. We had two trains, and now we have four,” Burba said.

The Marshall Islands-flagged Fulmar docked at the Klaipeda oil terminal on Friday morning, according to the vessel tracking websites Marinetraffic.com, Myshiptracking.com and Vesselfinder.com.

The tanker came from Russia’s Primorsk port, from which Transneft ships oil, via the Polish port of Gdansk.

Klaipedos Nafta, the terminal’s operator, told that the Fulmar had delivered around 75,000 tons of oil.

Belarus says it plans to purchase at least two tankers of crude oil monthly, even if pipelined supplies from Russia return to normal.

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