Germany’s PCK Schwedt refinery faces output cuts without Russian oil

LONDON (Reuters) -Germany’s 233,000 barrel-per-day PCK Schwedt refinery is set to reduce output as it stops using Russian oil, which it now receives via the Druzhba pipeline, the chief executive of its minority shareholder Shell said on Thursday.

PCK Schwedt, majority-owned by Russia’s Rosneft, supplies Berlin and large parts of eastern Germany with gasoline, diesel and jet fuel and an alternative pipeline via the port of Rostock cannot fully replace Druzhba.

Germany is in talks with Poland about the possibility of routing some supplies from the port of Gdansk to Schwedt.

The European Union is planning to ban Russian oil from the end of this year, although some countries dependent on Russian pipeline oil such as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary have voiced concerns over the plan.

Shell Chief Executive Ben van Beurden told a conference call that stopping Russian purchases “will probably mean that that refinery will be turned down quite significantly because the incoming logistics are constrained and the refinery is not configured for anything else but Urals”, a Russian crude.

He added that while there was some underloading of European refineries other than PCK Schwedt when Shell first stopped buying Russian oil in the wake of the Ukraine conflict, they were now back at full capacity loadings.

(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla)