Rosneft has expanded its presence in the Middle East, taking control of a terminal for storage of petroleum products in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli. The oil company hopes that the deal will contribute to the development of trading and joint projects with Lebanon. In return, Rosneft promises to invest in the terminal.

The Government of Lebanon provided the control of the terminal for the storage of petroleum products in the port of Tripoli to Rosneft for 20 years, the oil company reported. The capacity of the terminal is 2.5 million barrels. Under the terms of the deal, Rosneft undertakes to expand and reconstruct it. The report of Rosneft quotes head of the oil company Igor Sechin, who expected that the management of the facilities would contribute to the development of the trading and "implementation of a number of other possible projects in the oil and gas sector" of Lebanon. At the end of 2017, Lebanon auctioned a license for offshore blocks, as a result of which two sites were received by a consortium of Novatek, Eni and Total. Rosneft also showed interest in working on the country's shelf.

Rosneft is already involved in projects in the Middle East, including infrastructure projects. In particular, the company upgraded the export pipeline from Iraq to Turkey, increased the pipe capacity from 700 thousand to 1 million barrels per day. The share of Rosneft in the pipeline project is 60%, the rest is owned by KAR Group, as it follows from the data of the registry of the Singapore Kurdistan Pipeline Company Pte Ltd, established in the end of 2017. Director of the latter company is vice-president of Rosneft Otabek Karimov.

"There is an assumption that the agreement on the terminal is connected either with the supply of oil to Syria, or with the circumvention of sanctions on the supply of Iranian oil," - Kirill Semenov, director of the Center for Islamic Studies of the Institute for Innovative Development, explained to the Kommersant. Other options seem unlikely: Lebanon is not a country that buys oil in large quantities, and other countries nearby are either oil-producing, or it’s more profitable for them to buy from other Gulf countries. It is impossible to export Syrian oil for a while, and Syria is the only country that has access to Lebanon and needs oil. Moreover, the route of Beirut-Damascus is already intensively used as for freight traffic, as by those who use the airport in Beirut instead of Damascus. And it may be more profitable to carry oil to the south of Syria from Beirut than from the north, from Syrian Tartus".

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