MOL Hungarian Oil and Gas Closes Refinery Near Mantova, Italy

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Cordoba, Argentina)--MOL Hungarian Oil and Gas plc (Budapest, Hungary), the owner and operator of the 51,000-barrel-per-day (BBL/d) IES refinery southeast of Mantova, Italy, recently announced that it will close the refinery due to financial losses over the past years.

The international crisis that hit the European refining market has forced companies to close refineries in the central and northern Italian regions. The 86,000-BBL/d Total ERG Rome Refinery ceased activities in 2012 to become a storage terminal; the 80,000-BBL/d Eni Venecia Refinery was converted into a bio refinery in 2014; the 85,000-BBL/d Api Ancona refinery was shut down for six months due to poor margins early in 2013; and the 131,500-BBL/d Gela refinery recently announced that it will close line 2's naphtha production, which includes its 43,000-BBL/d Crude (Topping 2) and 24,780-BBL/d Delayed Coking 2 units.

The refinery is currently processing technical minimum rates of 40,000 BBL/d due to a union strike, though the company said that capacity will be kept as such until the end of 2013. Although expectations are to shut down the refinery until mid-January 2014, the company is defining its scope and schedule on the procedures to complete the shutdown and convert it to storage for finished products. The conversion could require a large investment; one possibility is to hire local companies to reduce the impact of the closure.

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