MOSCOW- Kazakhstan reduced its oil output by nearly 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) on Jan. 11 as poor winter weather caused power outages, two industry sources citing daily output data told Reuters on Tuesday.
Despite not being a major oil producer, Kazakhstan is a member of the wider oil output cut deal agreed between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, a group known as OPEC+.
Last week, OPEC+ allowed Kazakhstan and Russia to bump up their output by a combined 75,000 bpd in February and a further 75,000 bpd in March, while Saudi Arabia has pledged an additional 1 million bpd cut.
On Monday Kazakhstan suspended oil transit via Russia due to power outages caused by winter weather. The conditions triggered a fall in Kazakh oil production to 1.57 million bpd on Jan. 11 from 1.78 million bpd on Jan. 10, sources said.
Kazakhstan's energy ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Output at Kazakhstan's top oilfield Tengiz was down by 26% on Monday compared with Sunday's level at 437,792 barrels, while output on the second-largest Kashagan field was down by 7% to 353,921 barrels, according to the data seen by the sources.
Chevron-led Tengizchevroil, the operator of the Tengiz field, said it experienced a "temporary outage at one of its units, due to a power interruption on January 11, 2021", adding that production units were now operating.
One of the sources said oil output at the Kashagan oilfield remained lower than normal on Tuesday.
"It is not unusual for daily production to be reduced for various reasons," Kashagan's operator, the North Caspian Oil Company, said in a statement to Reuters without clarification when the output was expected to resume in full.
In was not immediately clear when overall oil production in Kazakhstan could be restored to pre-outage levels either.
Meanwhile, Kazakhstan resumed oil shipments via Russia in full late on Monday after suspending transit of nearly 300,000 bpd to the Russian ports, the state oil pipeline company Kaztransoil said in a statement on Tuesday.
Kazakhstan exports oil chiefly via three routes - Transneft pipelines in Russia, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) system running to the Black Sea coast and to China.
On Tuesday, CPC suspended oil offtake for a couple of hours amid power outages but operations were now back to normal, two industry sources said. CPC declined to comment.
(Reporting by Alla Afanasyeva and Olga Yagova, additional reporting by Maxim Rodionov Writing by Katya Golubkova Editing by Louise Heavens and David Evans) ((Olga.Yagova@thomsonreuters.com;))
