Gunvor’s Rotterdam Oil Refinery Halts Operation as Dangote Disrupts European Market

Gunvor Group is temporarily halting its Rotterdam oil refinery because it’s not making enough money, the latest sign that the continent’s plants are struggling to compete with upstarts in other parts of the world.
The company said in a statement that the refinery’s halt effective November 25 is due to a lack of prompt availability of commercially viable feedstock.

Bloomberg quoted Gunvor to have said it will, “continue to monitor the situation and assess future resupply for the refinery in due course.”
With a processing capacity of 75,000 barrels a day, the plant is relatively tiny. Still, it joins a growing list of European refineries with plans to either halt or downsize, including the Wesseling and Gelsenkirchen plants in Germany and the Grangemouth facility in Scotland.

Europe’s refineries are under pressure from large, new plants, including in the Middle East and Africa, such as Nigeria’s giant new Dangote refinery. The rival fuel makers can send what they make to Europe, and also compete for market share elsewhere in the world.

The Dangote Oil Refinery is a 650,000 barrels per day (BPD) integrated refinery situated in the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos, Nigeria. It is Africa’s biggest oil refinery and the world’s biggest single-train facility.
The Pipeline Infrastructure at the Dangote Petroleum Refinery is the largest anywhere in the world, with 1,100 kilometers to handle three Billion Standard Cubic Foot of gas per day. The Refinery alone has a 435MW Power Plant that is able to meet the total power requirement of Ibadan DisCo.

The Refinery is expected to meet 100 per cent of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export.
It was designed to process Nigerian crude with the ability to also process other crude oil.