Leuna (dpa/sa) – Saxony-Anhalt’s Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff (CDU) sees the refinery in Leuna as a “solid pillar” of the economy in the future. The chemical site as a whole is systemically important. “A piece of state history was written here and it should remain so,” he said on Wednesday on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of today’s Totalenergies Mitteldeutschland GmbH in Leuna (Saalekreis). It is also important for the ecological balance that “jobs are preserved here and not migrated”, that “we produce”, also in accordance with the high environmental standards that exist in the European Union, he said.
The crude oil processing plant is the heart of the Leuna chemical park with around 100 companies and more than 12,000 employees, including a good 600 in the refinery.
The petroleum processing plant was newly built in 1994 and put into operation in 1997. The Franco-German economic project was considered a key investment for structural change in East Germany.
Today, the refinery supplies around 1,300 petrol stations of all brands in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia with fuel such as petrol and diesel, which are made from crude oil. According to the company, from 2023 the refinery no longer wants to be dependent on Russian oil and instead wants to be supplied by customers in the market and develop alternative raw material and energy sources for the future in order to be competitive in the long term.
