Friday, March 29

Japan says to release 15 mln barrels of oil as part of IEA-led action


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TOKYO — Japan will release a record 15 million barrels of oil from its national reserves as part of a second round of the coordinated release led by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Thursday.

The release from state and private reserves is to help curb oil prices following the war in Ukraine, he told reporters.

IEA states agreed to tap 60 million barrels of oil from storage, the director of the group said on Wednesday, on top of a 180 million-barrel release announced by Washington last week.

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In the first round of the coordinated oil release of 60 million barrels, Japan provided 7.5 million barrels of oil reserves held by the private sector, becoming the second-biggest contributor after the United States.

Sanctions and buyer aversion have disrupted Russian oil supplies, pushing oil near $140 a barrel on March 7 despite the announcement of the previous IEA release about a week earlier. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation.”

Japan held a total of about 470 million barrels of petroleum reserves as of end-January, or 236 days of domestic consumption, comprising state reserves, oil reserves held by local refiners’ tanks and a joint crude oil storage scheme with producing countries. (Reporting by Kantaro Komiya, Tetsushi Kajimoto and Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Barbara Lewis)



financialpost.com