To track energy exports from Russia, we use a combination of sources reliably covering most of the data as well as apply assumptions to present the final result.
Data sources
| Route | Crude oil | Oil products | Fossil gas | Coal |
| Seaborne | AIS data | AIS data | AIS data | AIS data |
| Pipeline | Eurostat | Eurostat | ENTSO-G | n/a |
| Railway | Eurostat | Eurostat |
ENTSOG data is available on a daily and near real-time basis. Eurostat data, however, is only available on a monthly basis with a couple months of latency. We assume constant flows from the latest available data point til today, unless official commitments have already been made, in which case we consider the later.
Pipeline data for China is estimated by deducting seaborne shipments (estimated from AIS) from total imports as reported by Chinese customs.
Seaborne shipments
We track ship voyages between Russian ports and ports in other countries using data from MarineTraffic.com and Datalastic, derived from ship location (AIS) data.
A voyage consists of a ship taking on cargo and departing from a Russian port, arriving in a non-Russian port and discharging cargo. More complex trips such as loading cargo from both a Russian and a non-Russian port are excluded.
For crude oil tankers and LNG tankers, the type of cargo is known. We assume that oil products tankers and oil/chemical tankers carry oil products. Coal is transported by bulk carrier and general cargo ships which also carry many other types of cargo. We identified 25 “coal export terminals” within Russian ports that export coal. These are specific port locations that are associated with loading coal. When a vessel takes on cargo at one of these locations, we assume that the shipment is a coal shipment.
The amount of fuel transported in a shipment is estimated based on the cargo capacity (deadweight tonnage) of the ships, adjusted by the average ratio of ship capacity to reported customs volume. These ratios are calculated by aggregating the cargo capacity of shipments in the latest month with complete trade data (December 2021). Then we calculate the ratio of reported import volumes in that month to the gross tonnage of ships for each product. We then apply these ratios to estimate trade volumes on a day-to-day basis until the present.
Trade volumes and pricing of fossil fuels (i.e. oil, coal, and gas) are often not available on an hourly or daily basis, and neither are the terms for long-term contracts. To develop this counter, we, therefore, relied on some assumptions, as detailed below.
Insurance and ownership
We collect P&I and ownership data from Equasis on a regular basis (daily to weekly). However, Equasis does not publish a historical record of ship insurers. We therefore assume that the first insurer we found on Equasis for every single ship has always been its insurer prior that collection or indicated inception date.
Pricing
Fossil fuels are sold under a variety of contracts including fixed-price, indexed to average oil prices and indexed to other spot prices. This means that the revenue to the exporter is not directly proportional to the current spot price.
To estimate the prices of fossil fuel trades in 2022, we first derive historical monthly average prices for imports from Russia to the EU from Eurostat, and to the rest of the world from UN COMTRADE, since the trade values are indicated both in physical and monetary terms. We then fit models between these historical prices and average monthly spot prices for the current month and with lags (Brent crude oil, TTF gas, Newcastle steam coal, Asian LNG, ARA coal). Models are built for main trading partners individually, and for the rest of the world as a whole.
Since the start of the invasion, the reluctance of many traders to take cargoes from Russia, and more recently, bans on imports, have driven discounted pricing of Russian oil. We apply the discount between Brent and Urals crude prices to crude oil exports from Russia’s Baltic and Black Sea ports and the discount between Brent and ESPO to oil exports from Russia’s Pacific ports.
From December 5, 2022 onwards, we cap the price of crude oil carried aboard tankers owned or insured in the price cap coalition countries to the level of the price cap. From February 5, 2023, we will apply the cap respectively to oil products shipments.
Oil-indexed gas contracts have become less common over time, so we include a time interaction term in the model for pipeline gas prices. These models are then applied to current spot prices to estimate contract prices.
References
Eurostat: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/
ENTSO-G transparency platform: https://transparency.entsog.eu/
MarineTraffic: https://www.marinetraffic.com/
Datalastic: https://datalastic.com/
UN COMTRADE https://comtrade.un.org/Data/
Equasis: https://www.equasis.org/