Strategic Development of Oil Shipments from Russia to Palestine

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a significant expansion of world oil trade, which contributes to development of appropriate transport infrastructure, improvement and deepening of business ties in world energy markets and acceleration of their globalization. Russia plays an increasingly important role in export of oil and oil products, thereby seriously affecting physical volumes of foreign trade operations, prices, and the level of supply and demand. At the same time, interest in Russian oil is obviously taking into account the use of the existing or planned transport infrastructure. Despite the featured significant fluctuations in prices, which are caused by various factors of economic, geopolitical, and political nature, it is obvious that the general tendencies towards increase in oil prices remain against the background of the expected increase in demand for liquid fuel. This conclusion can be made on the basis of the costs of extracting energy resources, organizing the logistics component, of growing relevant political risks, according to competitive realities. In this regard, selection of an optimal transport route is of particular importance. The objective of the study is to test the algorithm developed by the authors for solving the multicriteria problem of choosing a rational route of fuel delivery within the framework of logistics chains from an oil refinery to a consumer. Testing is carried out at the example of development of hypothetical oil shipments from Russia to the State of Palestine. The use of the methods of economic analysis, multicriteria problem solving, expert assessments, representation of tasks in a multi-criteria setting using the developed deterministic method allows in each case to objectively find the best practical solution.The results of the analysis based on a sample of four options, have confirmed the possibility of using the proposed algorithm for solving the multicriteria problem to select the optimal route. The developed theory allows to objectively select the best proposal among possible variants; to improve the quality of the result obtained not only by the digital values of the accepted criteria, but also by taking into account the significance of different criteria among themselves by their influence on the process under consideration; to refine the intermediate data by using linear and nonlinear interpolation; to consider possible financial, time and other risks; to pose and solve problems taking into account hypothetical ways of transporting liquid fuel and compare the results with existing schemes.