From the end of the year, the refinery will be short of crude oil from Russia.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin The Federal Ministry of Economics reports progress in the supply of crude oil to the refinery PCK Schwedt. According to the ministry, for the first time a tanker loaded with European oil was dispatched in Gdansk, Poland, to pump the oil to Schwedt.
“This is an important step for Schwedt’s security of supply. Deliveries via Gdansk are possible, but the quantities still have to be increased,” said Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Economics, the Handelsblatt. To this end, we are “in close contact with the Polish government,” added Kellner.
The crude oil supply to the refinery has been a political issue for months. The refinery is currently supplied almost exclusively with crude oil from Russia via the “Druschba” (“Friendship”) pipeline. However, on December 31, the supply ends due to sanctions against Russia. The Federal Ministry of Economics is therefore trying to enable the refinery to be supplied from other sources.
The port of Rostock is in the foreground. However, due to the limited capacity of the existing pipeline connection to the port, the refinery cannot be fully utilized to the required extent with oil from Rostock alone. The Federal Ministry of Economics therefore wants to ensure that oil is also delivered from the port of Danzig to Schwedt.
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The Federal Ministry of Economics has been negotiating this with the Polish government for months. Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) was also in Warsaw for this reason.
The Polish government’s reservations are great. She does not want to help a company, some of which is still in Russian hands, to earn money by processing the oil delivered via Poland. The majority owner of PCK Schwedt is Rosneft Germany, a subsidiary of the Russian Rosneft Group. However, the federal government put Rosneft Germany under trusteeship in September.
The Polish side has doubts as to the extent to which Russian influence would actually be completely curbed, according to German and Polish government circles. This could also lead to reluctance when it comes to the question of how far the Germans want to open the delivery route via Gdansk. An industry insider said the first tanker to pass through the port of Gdańsk is not a breakthrough. A representative of the federal government said that an expropriation of Rosneft Germany was still not off the table, that the legal basis for this was in place.
Poland is not demanding any Russian participation
Polish Environment and Climate Minister Anna Moskwa said the Polish condition for cooperation was “that there should be no Russian involvement and presence in anything, be it storage or the refinery itself, anything that has oil in it Germany has to do”.
Patrycja Anna Tepper, economics expert at the Poznań West Institute, does not believe that Poland will be content with the trust solution in the long term. “Oil deliveries via Gdansk can only be further discussed and carried out if PCK finally parted with Rosneft shares,” said Tepper.
Without Gdansk, supplying the refinery in Schwedt will be difficult. According to the Federal Ministry of Economics, the pipeline from the port of Rostock to Schwedt currently has a capacity of up to seven million tons per year. According to the Ministry, this is enough for a capacity utilization of the PCK refinery of 50 to 60 percent. “With these quantities alone, however, the PCK refinery can only produce at minimum load. Therefore, in order for the PCK company to increase its productivity, the pipeline capacity must be increased in several steps,” the ministry said.
So-called flow improvers are used in a first step. They should make it possible to increase the capacity of the line by around ten percent at the beginning of next year. In a second step, the pipeline is to be modernized and upgraded so that after a two-year construction phase it can transport up to nine million tons of crude oil a year. The refinery in Schwedt could thus increase its capacity utilization to 75 percent. According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the refinery has already commissioned an engineering office for the planning.
The EU had agreed on an import ban
A few weeks ago, the federal government announced that it would provide financial support for upgrading the pipeline because of the central function of the refinery in Schwedt for security of supply in large parts of eastern Germany and western Poland. A three-digit million amount is available for this.
At the beginning of June, the EU agreed on an import ban on Russian oil that comes to Europe by sea. Exceptions should remain possible for transports by pipeline. However, Germany and Poland had declared that they did not want to use the exceptions and would stop Russian imports via pipelines at the end of the year.
The federal government has yet to issue a corresponding ordinance prohibiting oil procurement via the Druzhba pipeline. According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, this should be done “by the end of the year”.
More: Cold withdrawal of Russian gas – Germany is threatened with an emergency winter