A largest oil refinery in Europe is disrupted… burdening the continent with more worries

Europe’s largest oil refinery is facing a failure that will cause further disruptions to the market for refined petroleum products, especially gasoline and diesel.

In details, Shell has reported that it had to burn gas at the Bernice refinery, which has a capacity of 404,000 barrels per day, in the Netherlands, due to a failure in one of the site’s facilities since last Wednesday, October 12.

“Due to a malfunction in one of our facilities, we were forced to burn associated gas,” the company said on its Twitter account, adding that it was investigating the cause of the accident at Europe’s largest oil refinery, and was doing its best to solve the problem as soon as possible.

The compressor of the second catalytic cracker unit at Europe’s largest oil refinery has stopped due to a power outage, according to a fire safety alert for the region.

Fluid catalytic cracking units are commonly used in the manufacture of refined products such as gasoline.

In a notice on its website, the Environmental Protection Agency (DCMR) said that Shell’s Berenice refinery near Rotterdam had burned large quantities of gas in the wake of the accident, prompting 200 complaints from citizens.

“I can only tell you that we expect the disturbance to continue at this time, and we’re trying to minimize it for those in the vicinity,” a company spokesperson said.

In its statement, the company didn’t clarify how much processing capacity was affected by the accident at the largest refinery in Europe, or what this would mean for fuel supplies.

Europe cannot afford a physical disruption to refined oil supplies, given that the EU’s ban on Russian oil products is due to start in early February 2023.

Wage strikes in France have also brought the country’s fuel industry to a standstill, causing supplies to collapse.

Oil refineries went on strike, disrupting the performance of about a third of France’s gas stations, as well as fueling a shortage of distillates, especially diesel, globally.

The protesting workers are demanding reforms in the pension and retirement sector, in light of the high cost of living, with issues related to wages.

The government is working to end the strikes and resume work again to restart the refineries, in order to solve the fuel crisis in France, in an attempt to prevent the worsening of the energy crisis in the winter with the shortage of Russian fuel.