Leuna (dpa/sa) – The refinery in Leuna is currently doing without the delivery of Russian crude oil. “We have now completely stopped purchasing Russian crude oil in accordance with our announcement in March 2022 and we will be independent of Russian crude oil from 2023,” said a spokeswoman for Total Energies Germany on Thursday. However, the quantities contractually guaranteed to date have not been sufficient. The processing is below the average utilization of the refinery in recent years, said the spokeswoman. First, the “Mitteldeutsche Zeitung” (Thursday) reported about it.
Instead of being transported by pipeline from Russia, as was previously the case, crude oil is transported by tanker or cargo ship to the port of Gdansk on the Polish Baltic Sea coast. From there, the oil is pumped around 1,000 kilometers by pipeline to the refinery in Leuna. “The entire logistics are therefore significantly more complex and lengthy, and the logistics costs are significantly higher,” reported the spokeswoman. “From January 2023 it will become clear whether the logistics system from Gda?sk via Poland and Germany is able to transport the amount of crude oil required, because we share this capacity with our competitors.” One competitor is PCK Schwedt in Brandenburg.
Totalenergies Raffinerie Mitteldeutschland GmbH (Leuna/Spergau) with around 600 employees is the heart of the Leuna Chemical Park (Saalekreis). Around 100 companies with more than 12,000 employees are based on this industrial site. According to previous information, the refinery supplies around 1,300 filling stations in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia with fuel. The processing capacity is around 12 million tons of crude oil per year.
