INSIGHT: Shell’s Wesseling crude transformation has wide implications for chemicals

LONDON (ICIS)–These are early days, but the transformation of refinery sites away from the production of gasoline and a much greater focus on site emissions is altering the local and regional landscape for petrochemicals.

Shell told employees on Thursday that it plans to stop crude oil processing at its Wesseling site in Germany.

In comments translated from German, it said that in converting the Shell Rheinland refinery into the ‘Energy and Chemicals Plant Rheinland’ the next step is to make the Wesseling site “free of crude oil”.

Crude processing is to be replaced with new or reallocated plants.

“For more CO2 [carbon dioxide]-free or low-carbon products, hydrogen, circular waste materials and biogenic input materials are increasingly being used,” the company said.

Final investment decisions (FID) are pending but Shell made it clear that crude oil distillation in Cologne-Godorf, an associated refinery, will remain in operation. It added that “the Shell Verbund in northwest Europe will ensure the security of supply with fuels and other mineral oil products” in the coming years.

While the focus of refinery outputs are necessarily on the local and regional provision of fuels, it is the supply of essential petrochemicals and petrochemical feedstocks, largely naphtha, that will influence regional markets and local downstream chemical processing capabilities.

ICIS data show most of Shell’s local aromatics (benzene and toluene) production located at Godorf with most of the olefins, mixed xylenes (and extraction to paraxylene, PX, orthoxylene, OX) and methanol at Wesseling.

The Shell cracker at Wesseling has a nameplate capacity of 315,000 tonnes/year.

The petrochemical industry in northwest Europe relies so heavily on its own ‘verbund’ that changes to the patterns of integration with major refineries like this will have major ramifications for feedstock supply, costs, and production capabilities.

The ICIS Supply and Demand Database shows that Shell has 7.5m tonnes/year of crude processing capacity at Wesseling, and 9.8m tonnes/year of crude processing capacity at Godorf.

ICIS analysts estimate that the three Crackers in the Godorf/Wesseling area require around 3m tonnes/year of naphtha as feed, and the likely impact of a full closure of the Wesseling refinery site is estimated at a reduction of around 750,000- 1m tonnes/year light naphtha production.

Close to, and integrated with, the Shell Rheinland refineries are crackers first built about 60 years ago, such as the two crackers at LyondellBasell’s largest production complex in Europe, at Wesseling, close to the Shell refineries.

LyondellBasell’s Wesseling/Knapsack complex has a production capacity of more than 2.2m tonnes/year of polyolefins, according to the company’s website.

It is home to two steam crackers, four high density polyethylene (HDPE) plants, two low density polyethylene (LDPE) plants, three polypropylene (PP) plants, and one advanced polyolefins plants.

INEOS is another example of a producer with two crackers integrated into the regional feedstock and downstream chemicals network.

INEOS describes itself as the largest chemical company and third largest industrial employer in Cologne.

INEOS Cologne is one of the largest locations for the privately held company where naphtha “produced in refineries during the processing of crude oil, delivered to the site by barges on the Rhine River or by pipelines”.

The two former Erdolchemie/BP crackers at Cologne process naphtha with the ethylene used to make LDPE, metallocene linear low density polyethylene (MLLDPE) and, according to INEOS, several other base chemicals.

“The site consists of 21 plants and is connected to three major feedstock and product pipelines. It produces more than 5m tonnes of products per annum, of which 85% are sold in Germany and the Benelux [Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg] countries to nearly 900 customers,” the company said on it website.

“70% of these customers have their companies located in a 200 km ‘circle’ around the site. This means that the site is extremely well located concerning feedstock supplies and transporting of chemicals to customers.”

Shell, LyondellBasell, and INEOS had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing about the implications of transformation away from crude processing at Shell’s Wesseling, but the numbers speak for themselves.

There are major changes afoot in the way that crude is processed because of the energy transition.

We may no longer talk about ‘peak oil’, but we are beginning to think very seriously about the implications of ‘no oil’.

Front page picture: Shell’s facilities in Wesseling
Source: Friedemann Vogel/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock 

Insight article by Nigel Davis