Saturday is a big day in Ulaanbaatar. The ₮50,000 fuel cap lapses, and with it the rule that let you buy petrol only on days matching the parity of your licence plate. That same morning, a different parity rule takes over: from 15 August to 12 September, cars may enter six central districts between 07:00 and 21:00 only on days matching their plates. The queue rule ends; the road rule begins. A driver who has spent two weeks memorising which mornings he may buy fuel can now apply the same skill to whether he may use it.
There is precedent for half of this. In the summer of 1979, Californian drivers bought gasoline on odd or even days, and the system worked badly but comprehensibly: the scarcity was at the pump, so the rule stood at the pump. Ulaanbaatar has improved on the design. It is lifting the pump rule at the exact moment supply is supposed to arrive, and installing the road rule at the exact moment the guests do. COP17 opens on 17 August and runs to the 28th; the traffic scheme runs through all of it and three weeks past. My column last week said the queue was timed to end when the guests arrive. I undersold it. The cars are timed to leave the roads as the delegates land.
Then there is the supply itself, which is where the arithmetic gets interesting. The month's book stands at 75,000 tonnes of AI-92. Of that, 50,000 was already under contract with Rosneft before the industry minister flew to Moscow. The trip, his ninth to somewhere in a year, produced the other 25,000 and 5,000 tonnes of jet fuel, and a sentence of thanks to the Russian government posted on his personal account. His ministry put the agreement on its website. Interfax picked it up from his posts. Kommersant hyperlinked them. And on the Russian side, across every ministry and both companies he met: nothing. Not a line. The largest single piece of good news in Mongolia's hardest fuel month exists, as of this writing, entirely on Mongolian authority.
“The queue rule ends; the road rule begins.”
The tonnes may well arrive. Russia has shipped Mongolia its petrol for decades, and shipped 173,000 tonnes in July while its own exporters sat behind a ban. The form is the story. A promise that lives on one side of the border is a promise whose terms live there too: price, timing, and the right to reschedule. Mongolia's negotiating position is a national reserve counted in days and a minister whose gratitude is publishable before his counterparty's signature.
On the 15th, then, the caps come off because the fuel is coming, the cars come off the roads because the guests are coming, and both propositions rest on schedules written elsewhere. The one instrument in this file that has never slipped is the calendar itself. It says the zero customs duties expire on 1 February 2027, the refinery is due in 2028, and the desert conference opens on Monday. Ulaanbaatar has learned to legislate by date and hope by tonne. If the trains from Angarsk run, no one will reread the fine print of August. If they do not, the city will at least have taught its drivers, twice in one month, to check the number on their own plates before believing anything else.