I just laid out the oil numbers elsewhere and won’t again here.
Probably worth asking what is an “illegal oil sale”? because if the intent is to label all 7.4 million bpd of Russia’s export illegal, then I can outright assure them that 70% of that is not even on ships, shadow or otherwise. It’s Asian pipelines via Transneft.
Enormous oil totals flow by pipeline to China and India, and even more is intermixed in Khazahkstan with Kazakh oil and Azerbaijani oil, and then is pipelined . . . also to China’s voracious 16.5 million bpd consumption.
How provocative would the Russians consider an unexpected interruption in their export pipeline flow to China and India? Is there alternate delivery means redundancy for the Russians to get most of it to China and India by shadow fleet tankers instead? That it, if their pipelines kept going offline indefinitely? Is this am act of war? How about sinking their shadow fleet?
How deep down the rabbit hole here do we want to go?