More Russian supply would ease concern that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries can't increase shipments in the event of disruptions to output from Iraq, Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico. Crude oil last week reached $54.88 a barrel in New York, the highest in more than two decades of futures trading. Russia, the world's second-largest oil exporter, can ship another 260,000 barrels a day onto the world market after expanding pipelines and a port on the Baltic Sea, Transneft deputy CEO Sergei Grigoryev said. The extra oil may go to China, Germany, Lithuania, Ukraine or to Baltic ports, he added. "Our export capacity hasn't been fully used for the past several months," Grigoryev said in a telephone interview from his Moscow office. "It seems oil companies don't have the oil to fill the pipelines." Russian producers such as TNK-BP, the country's third- biggest oil company by output, said they need to know well in advance of extra capacity before they can take it up. "One needs to know beforehand of such spare capacity," Marina Dracheva, a spokeswoman at TNK-BP, said in a telephone interview. "We're using an elaborate price optimization model to choose where to sell our oil. Recently, the domestic market has been rather attractive." Companies including TNK-BP and Sibneft are able to export about a third of their output through the pipelines with the rest supplied to refineries or to domestic oil loading terminals for export on river barges or rail cars. "Sibneft exports what it needs by pipelines, we use our quota as much as we need," said John Mann, a spokesman at Sibneft, Russia's No. 5 oil producer. "Right now we don't see problems with export limitations." Sibneft exports some oil by pipeline to Kazakhstan for further shipments in rail cars to China, Mann said. Transneft's Grigoryev said more capacity is available to ship oil along that route. Surgutneftegaz exported 3.6 million tons of oil (72,000 barrels per day) by rail last year, said Raisa Khodchenko, a spokeswoman at the Surgut-based company, citing CEO Vladimir Bogdanov. The producer exports crude in rail cars via an Estonian port on the Baltic Sea from its Kinef refinery in the Leningrad region. LUKoil and Yukos, Russia's largest oil exporters, earlier this year criticized Transneft for failing to expand pipelines to match output, which rose 50 percent in the past six years. Alexander Shadrin, a spokesman at Yukos, couldn't immediately comment on export shipments. Dmitry Dolgov, a spokesman at LUKoil, declined to comment. As recently as September 2003, Russia's pipeline export capacity was about 800,000 barrels per day below demand, Transneft said then. That bottleneck forced producers to use more expensive railroads to ship crude from Russia, which trails only Saudi Arabia in oil exports. The spare capacity represents 5.4 percent of the 4.8 million barrels a day of oil Russia will export this year, according to Bloomberg calculations. PIN//Bloomberg