The leak was identified in Pniewy, western Poland, near a pipeline that transports oil to German refineries. Polish firefighters received information about a possible leak at around 7:30 a.m. on December 1.
Polish fire service spokesman Martin Halasz told Bloomberg that the east-west crude oil flow was shut down when the incident was detected and representatives of pipeline operator PERN were at the scene.
The damaged pipeline supplies oil to the Leuna and Schwedt refineries in Germany, which buy oil via the Polish port of Gdansk on the Baltic Sea. The Schwedt refinery also buys oil from Kazakhstan.
According to Reuters, operator PERN confirmed that the oil pipeline leak in western Poland forced the Druzhba pipeline operator to temporarily stop pumping with a branch in the system.
PERN said that, in addition to the leaking pipeline branch that was immediately closed, oil supplies are still being pumped through the second branch, which has the technical capacity to meet customer demand.
The cause of the latest incident involving the Druzhba pipeline has not yet been determined and an internal commission operating at PERN will investigate the cause of the incident.
Druzhba is a giant Soviet-era pipeline. Construction began in the early 1960s and now spans a 5,500-kilometer network, bringing Urals oil from Russia directly to refineries in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The Druzhba pipeline pumps between 750,000 and 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day and has a capacity of up to 1.4 million barrels per day. This fuel is then refined by EU companies into diesel, naphtha, gasoline, lubricants and other products that are sold in and outside the bloc.
With its enormous volume, the Druzhba pipeline became the centerpiece of the Central European energy industry, building an entire ecosystem that sustained thousands of direct and indirect jobs, but at the same time made the region heavily dependent on supplies from Russia in the period before the conflict broke out in Ukraine.
