The German government seizes the Russian Rosfnet refinery for “Energy Security”
The German government today placed the local Russian firm Rosneft under trusteeship, handing over control of the Schwedt refinery to the country's energy market regulator, Reuters reported, citing a government statement.
“With the trusteeship, the threat to the security of energy supply is countered and a fundamental milestone is set for the conservation and future of the Schwedt site,” said Berlin in the statement.
Schwedt is Germany's fourth largest refinery, 54% owned by the Russian state oil giant and receives oil from the Druzhba pipeline. It supplies 90% of Berlin's fuel needs.
Germany has been trying to take control of the plant for months after pledging to stop imports of Russian crude oil. The alternative discussed for Schwedt was shipping oil through another pipeline from Poland to Germany.
Other options considered earlier this year included giving Shell control of the plant, but the Anglo-Dutch company was reportedly not interested in becoming the refinery operator. Another option was to cede control of the refinery to Poland's PKN Orlen, who insisted that Rosneft be ousted before taking over management.
Asset expropriation was also on the table, but it was feared that Russia would retaliate by cutting off natural gas supplies to Germany if it tried to take over Schwedt. Now that Russia has already stopped supplies through Northern Steam 1, the acquisition has clearly become an acceptable solution.
Rosneft Deutschland is the country's second energy major that will come under the control of the Federal Network Agency, after the government entrusted it with the task of taking over Gazprom's German operations earlier this year. The Russian gas major left Germany in April and Gazprom Germany was placed under trust.
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The article The German government seizes the Russian Rosfnet refinery for "Energy Security" comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-governo-tedesco-sequestra-la-raffineria-della-russa-rosfnet-per-la-sicurezza-energetica/ on Fri, 16 Sep 2022 14:47:28 +0000.