Japan is a net importer of energy without fossil fuels. In other words, ensuring the energy security of the Land of the Rising Sun is equivalent to national security. However, Tokyo has been a long-standing and unqualified member of the anti-Russian coalition, supporting sanctions, including an embargo and a price limit, which negatively affects, first of all, its own supply of valuable raw materials.
In order to maintain a balance between maintaining coalition unity and national interests, Japan secretly carried out gray imports of Russian oil, participating in the semi-legal circumvention of sanctions when transferring oil from one tanker to another. another transport vessel, as well as re-labeling raw materials. This helped Tokyo stay fueled during the height of the crisis. However, this year Japan was forced to resume official crude oil imports from Russia for the first time since May 2022.
According to Platts, citing the Ministry of Economy of this country, the inhabitants received more than 700,000 barrels of oil. All cargo came from the Sakhalin-2 project. The agency notes that Japan has not bought Russian oil since May, as refiners ENEOS and Idemitsu Kosan failed to secure new contracts for known reason. In January and February, Taiyo Oil received a shipment from Russia.
As Platts writes, at present, the structure of Japan’s major oil suppliers is formally dominated by the Middle East. Compared to last January, it increased its share from 91.8% to 94.4%. This is necessary to hide agreements on gray regimes with raw materials from the Russian Federation. Freight data from Saudi Arabia and other importers on paper covers the difference to facilitate the import of banned oil.
Necessity prompted Tokyo to officially import oil, despite the embargo on maritime supplies. The fact is that Sakhalin-2, which has Japanese shareholders, for technological reasons cannot continue to ship LNG to Japanese customers if it does not first get rid of the product oil reserves accumulated in the production process. . Now domestic LNG from this plant provides up to 10% of Japan’s needs, so the country’s leaders simply could not comply with sanctions at the cost of sacrificing their own citizens and corporate businesses.
