Rosneft to Ship 180,000 bpd to China from 2020

Russia's top oil producer Rosneft has reached an agreement to ship 180,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil to its jointly owned Chinese refinery project from 2020, the company's head Igor Sechin said on Tuesday.

The Kremlin-controlled company, which had already agreed on the volumes but had yet to pin down the start date, plans to triple its oil sales to China from the roughly 300,000 bpd shipped last year.

The Tianjin refinery, a project between Rosneft and CNPC, will be operational by the end of 2019 with Rosneft shipping 9.1 million tonnes a year of crude oil for the plant from 2020 via the Pacific port of Kozmino, Sechin said during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to China.

Sechin, a close ally of Putin, also said that Russia had offered to scrap extraction taxes for gas supplies designated for China, while Beijing was looking to abolish import taxes for Russian gas.

Rosneft has been lobbying for the rights to sell gas abroad via pipelines, aiming to end the monopoly of another Russian energy champion, Gazprom.

"We are talking about deposits that will be a source for gas supplies to the China market. This is a very smart and valuable proposal that can become a basis for compromise," Sechin told reporters.

Earlier on Tuesday, a Kremlin spokesman said Russia and China had not yet reached a long-awaited gas sales deal.

Reporting by Alexei Anishchuk