Experts of the Kazakhstan Fuel Association have criticized local oil refineries. Sergei Smirnov, expert of the Association, said that three Kazakhstan oil refineries do not manufacture fuel with quality and quantity that the consumer needs.
“Our oil refineries produce a total of 1.9 million tons of Ai-92 petrol (with the demand of 2.8 million tons) and about 4 million tons of diesel fuel (with the demand of 4.6 million tons,” said the expert.
Smirnov added that upgrade of the oil refineries in Kazakhstan could be compared with the repair of the roads in the country. “A lot of budgetary funds and loans have been spent, but the roads are still in a pretty bad shape. The situation is the same with the oil refineries. They are constantly upgraded. But if in Russia almost all oil refineries managed to transit to Euro-4 fuel, we still manufacture Euro-2 standard fuel. Russia refines about half of total volume of produced oil, while in Kazakhstan this index is about 18%,” Smirnov said.
He said the local oil products market will have a fuel shortage till 2019, when upgrade of local oil refineries is finished.
Smirnov said that the term of completion of upgrade (refining of 18.5 million tons of oil and production of Euro-4 and Euro-5 oil products) has been moved from 2015 to 2019, reported www.oilnews.kz.
