OREANDA-NEWS. Tankers Atlantas and Calida, carrying together 2 million barrels of Iranian oil for LOTOS, have just arrived at Naftoport in Gdańsk. The oil is currently being unloaded.

Given the depths of the Danish Straits, which limit a tanker’s maximum permitted draught to 15 metres, before entering the Baltic, Atlantas had to transfer around 700,000 barrels to Calida. The operation was carried out on August 12th and 13th.

The Atlantas supertanker reached Naftoport in Gdańsk under a contract between Grupa LOTOS S.A. and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). The contract is a result of LOTOS’s efforts to ensure greater diversification of supply sources of strategic raw materials and increase Poland’s energy security.

‘Under the contract, LOTOS was supplied with 2 million barrels of Iranian Light,’ explains Robert Pietryszyn, President of Grupa LOTOS S.A. ‘Only a VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) supertanker was able to transport such a huge cargo on a single voyage.’ VLCC tankers are among the largest crude carriers in the world, and Atlantas was one of the largest tanker ships to have ever called at Naftoport.

The oil from both tankers will be transported from Naftoport to LOTOS and PERN by pipelines. Then, it will be processed at the refinery in Gdańsk. The Iranian oil will be processed separately (usually, different types of crude are mixed) in order to collect detailed data for further economic and technological analyses.

Atlantas left Iran’s Kharg Island terminal at the end of June 2016. It covered 12,000 nautical miles, going around Africa along the way, as the draught of vessels of that class, when loaded, is too large to navigate the Suez Canal.