It supplies 90 per cent of oil to North Korea ... so why is China’s pipeline excluded from UN sanctions?

It supplies 90 per cent of oil to North Korea ... so why is China’s pipeline excluded from UN sanctions?

A joint pipeline would be expensive – and maybe impossible – to repair if crude flows stopped completely, specialists say

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 12 September, 2017

Kristin Huang

source  South China Morning Post

edited by kcontents

An oil pipeline that supplies 90 per cent of North Korea’s crude has been excluded from the latest United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang in part for one very practical reason: once China turns it off, it can’t be easily turned back on again.

The Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline delivers more than half a million tonnes of crude oil to North Korea a year yet the supplies were explicitly excluded from the resolution passed by the UN Security Council on Monday in response to Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test.

Described by Washington as the strongest yet, the resolution included cutting off more than 55 per cent of refined petroleum products going to North Korea, capping imports of refined petroleum products at 2 million barrels per year, and freezing the existing amount of crude oil delivered to the hermit state.

But it also stated that the crude oil going through the Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline was exempted, prompting criticism that the resolution was a half measure.

Analysts said the exemption reflected Beijing’s unwillingness to drive Pyongyang to even greater desperation.

But Liu Ming, a North Korean affairs analyst from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said technical factors with the pipeline were real and “could not be ignored”.

“The crude oil transported via the Dandong-Sinuiju pipeline contains a high proportion of wax. If the flow of oil slows or stops, the pipeline becomes blocked, which in turn is expensive to repair. The pipeline can even be damaged beyond repair in extreme cases,” Liu said.

Heavy crude oil is pumped to North Korea from a facility in the Chinese border city of Dandong. Photo: Handout

The pipeline’s crude supplies are from the Daqing oilfield in Heilongjiang province and are typically

low in sulphur and high in wax. The mix solidifies easily in cold weather or when the flow slows to a certain point, according to a PetroChina Pipeline Research and Development Centre report.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2110879/whats-one-big-technical-reason-china-wont-turn-north

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