Venezuela prepares a shipment of diesel for Cuba, after a seven-month pause in that exportscombustible to the island.
The oil parastatal PDVSA organizes a shipment of at least 190 thousand barrels of diesel, according to a document consulted by the Reuters agency, which points out in a dispatch that since September Cuba has not received that fuel from its political ally, which is why it has been obliged to buy it on the open market and at higher prices.
According to a PDVSA export schedule, seen this Tuesday by Reuters, the Cuban-flagged tanker Delsa, chartered by the state company Cubametales, is loading 200,000 barrels of fuel oil and 190,000 barrels of diesel destined for the terminal. Matanzas storage facility.
The website specialized in vessel location, Vessel Finder, also located this Tuesday the Delsa tanker in Puerto José, a maritime terminal in the northeast of Venezuela, in the Caribbean Sea, in the state of Anzoátegui.
The aforementioned agency also states that at the beginning of 2022, PDVSA sent jet fuel and gasoline to the island, according to documents and tanker tracking data.
Although the Cuban government has not recognized a deficit in this fuel for vehicles and electricity generation from diesel engine battery units, in recent monthsthe country had to go out and buy on the open market given the slowdown in Venezuelan exports.
Venezuelan refineries in recent weeks have processed about 230,000 barrels per day (bpd), a level well below their capacity of 1.3 million bpd, according to independent figures cited by Reuters.
In 2020, Washington suspended authorizations to exchange oil for fuel to the South American country due to the re-export of diesel from Venezuela to Cuba.
Cuba needs Venezuelan fuel imports to cover more than half of its demand, and in recent months the shortage of diesel and gasoline there has generatedlong lines in front of service centers.
According to Refinitiv Eikon data, Cuba imported about 70,000 bpd of crude oil and fuel in the first quarter of the year, below the 100,000 bpd that the island generally requires to satisfy normal demand.
Venezuela has sharply cut fuel shipments to Cuba from nearly 44,000 bpd in 2020 to 21,000 bpd in 2021 and 22,000 bpd in the first quarter of this year, according to internal PDVSA documents.
Before the pandemic, Cuba's fuel demand reached 137,000 bpd of fuel oil, diesel, gasoline, cooking gas and other refined products, according to Cuba's National Statistics Office.
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