On Friday, oil is again flowing through the Druzhba pipeline to the Czech Republic. This was confirmed by the director of the refining company Orlen Unipetrol Mariusz Wnuk on the X social network. Deliveries were interrupted on Wednesday for an unknown reason, reports TASR correspondent in Prague.
“Oil supplies were restored this morning and oil is again flowing through the Druzhba pipeline to the Czech Republic. We thank the Czech government and the Administration of State Material Reserves of the Czech Republic for the quick preventive action and cooperation,” said Wnuk.
According to the Czech Minister of Industry and Trade Lukáš Vlček, deliveries were resumed after midnight and the causes of the outage are still being investigated. Reuters reported on Thursday that the outage was due to payment problems between transit Ukraine and Russia.
Vlček noted that energy has become part of Russia’s hybrid war with the West. According to him, the current government has taken the necessary steps to The Czech Republic became independent from Russia. “As it turned out, we can do without it now, and thanks to the work on the TAL pipeline, we will switch to non-Russian oil completely next year,” the minister added.
The company Orlen Unipetrol informed on Wednesday morning that oil does not flow to the Czech Republic through the Druzhba pipeline, which leads from Russia to Central Europe, and this was subsequently confirmed by Vlček. The government therefore decided that in the event of a longer outage, the refinery will be able to borrow 330,000 tons of oil from Czech emergency stocks. In the end, that didn’t happen.
