The biggest gray area in Russian oil sanctions are hydrocarbon tracking.
How do you track crude oil supplied by Russia which was converted to other precursors like Aromatics and shipped to other non-sanctioned countries, which are then converted to end products and sold to Western world? The refiner can claim they produced the end product without any Russian oil..
This goes above our heads too! Really hard to correctly pinpoint which crude-based, derivative-fed end product came from whose crude. In such a case, only blanket bans work to truly sanction a country, but that does not bring any good to anybody.
The biggest gray area in Russian oil sanctions are hydrocarbon tracking.
How do you track crude oil supplied by Russia which was converted to other precursors like Aromatics and shipped to other non-sanctioned countries, which are then converted to end products and sold to Western world? The refiner can claim they produced the end product without any Russian oil..
This goes above our heads too! Really hard to correctly pinpoint which crude-based, derivative-fed end product came from whose crude. In such a case, only blanket bans work to truly sanction a country, but that does not bring any good to anybody.