Serbia's Oil Supply: The JANAF Outage Shows One Pipeline Is Not a Strategy

The caretaker government did the sensible thing on Friday when it allowed NIS to draw up to 66,000 tonnes of crude from state reserves. With deliveries through Croatia's JANAF pipeline halted since 6 November, the Pančevo refinery needed oil, and petrol stations needed fuel. Acting quickly, and telling people there was no reason to hoard, deserves credit.

A single route, stated plainly

But the government's own statement contains the sentence that should worry everyone: there is no alternative to the JANAF route, and the refinery cannot work without it. A country whose only refinery depends on a single pipeline through a neighbouring state is exposed to every accident, repair and political dispute along that line. This is not a new discovery. It has simply become visible.

What citizens are entitled to know

Strategic reserves exist for moments like this, and using them is not a failure. Yet the public has not been told how large the reserves are, on what terms NIS receives the crude, or how and when the stocks will be replenished. Some confidentiality around reserves is reasonable. Basic information on how many days of supply the country holds, and who pays when the state lends oil to a company under US sanctions, is not a state secret.

A task for the next government

Weekly decisions by a caretaker cabinet, from the excise cut to the reserve release, can bridge a crisis but cannot replace a plan. The incoming Student List government, which has said it does not intend to nationalise NIS, will inherit an unresolved ownership question, an expiring US licence regime and an import route with no back-up. It should present a supply-security plan early: how reserves will be rebuilt, which additional routes for crude are realistic and at what cost, and how the refinery would run if JANAF stopped again for weeks.

Diversification is expensive, and those who argue that Serbia cannot afford a second route have a point. But the cost of the next long outage could be higher still. That debate should happen in the open, before the next emergency rather than during it.