Russia's Tatneft has reported a 2.4% growth in gross revenues in the period between January and September but net income fell marginally.

The regional oil player reported revenues of over 691 billion roubles ($10.8 billion) in the reporting period against 675 billion a year earlier.

The company reported net income of 173 billion roubles as against 174 billion roubles in the first nine months of 2018.

Despite the continued challenging oil price environment in the third quarter, Tatneft’s operating performance actually improved in this period, with revenues up by 9% to 242 billion roubles against 222 billion roubles in the second quarter.

Net profit also rose by 8% in the third quarter of this year to 58 billion roubles against 54 billion roubles in the previous quarter.

During the third quarter, revenues improved as it started to clear oil that it sent to storage reservoirs in the previous quarter by shipping it via the Druzhba (Friendship) export trunklineto customers in Poland and Germany.

A share of exported oil from the total production thus rose to 66% in the third quarter against 53% in the second quarter of the year.

Russian oil supplies to these two countries dropped significantly in the second quarter as the Druzhba network became clogged with Russian oil, contaminated by organic chlorides that become highly corrosive when oil is heated at refiners. The operation of Druzhba had to be halted for more than one month while solutions to remove that oil were sought.

Despite working on heavily depleted oilfields at its home region of Tatarstan in Russia, Tatneft said that its efforts to introduce in-house tertiary recovery methods and new drilling resulted in the growth of oil production by almost 3% to 583,000 barrels per day during the reporting period against the last year.

Finance

Tatneft posts $10.8bn revenues