German refineries: we will run out of oil with sanctions on Russia!
The PCK Schwedt refinery in Germany has announced it will not have enough crude oil when the latest EU sanctions against Russia come into effect, said the CEO of Shell, who is a minority shareholder of PCK Schwedt.
The refinery which was majority owned by Russia's Rosneft before the German government decided to expropriate it last month , Reuters reported. Although the process has not yet been completed, Germany has made it clear that it does not want a Russian company to operate one of its largest refineries.
The problem is that the refinery , which has a capacity of 233,000 barrels per day, operates with Russian oil, delivered via the Druzhba pipeline. Once the oil embargo goes into effect, there will actually be no raw material for the processing plant.
According to German Economy Minister Robert Habeck, the country is in talks with Poland, even if "the Poles say, rightly, 'We don't want to bring Polish oil to Germany to keep Schwedt alive'", because this refinery is anyway Russian and, unless otherwise decided, it will go back to being Russian at the end of the emergency.
"But we are talking about a case in which Germany supports Poland and Poland will help Germany in the event that Rosneft is no longer the operator of the refinery," the minister also said, speaking of the possibility of supplying the refinery through the Polish port of Gdansk ..
Commenting on the potential fallout from the embargo this week, Shell's Ben van Beurden said the embargo “will likely mean that refinery production will be reduced quite significantly because inbound logistics are constrained and the refinery is not configured for anything. other than for the Urals ”. Remember that not all oil is the same and refineries have operating ranges suitable for particular types of oil or their mixtures.
Schwedt is not the only refinery in Europe configured for the Russian blend. Lukoil Neftohim Burgas, the only Bulgarian refinery and largest processing plant in the Balkans, also uses Ural crude as a raw material, making its future uncertain in the event of a general embargo on Russian oil in the EU. Bulgaria has asked for an exemption from oil sanctions, along with Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. A fair measure to have unanimity, but which makes the whole sanctioning regime a joke.
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The article German refineries: we will be short of oil with sanctions on Russia! comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/raffinerie-tedesche-saremo-a-corto-di-petrolio-con-le-sanzioni-alla-russia/ on Sun, 08 May 2022 07:00:19 +0000.