Originally Posted by
Tartiflette Fan
Have to say- albeit as someone with no knowledge of the oil-industry - I can't believe that they have destroyed 12% of Russia's refining capacity.in 2 days as Bloomberg claims. Believable for me would be " have hit refineries responsible for 12% of ......" which might then mean destruction of 1-2% ( pure guess ) refining capacity..
Your scepticism is justified. To put things in context Russian oil & condensate production (i.e. "liquids") is about 10-million barrel per day, which represents approximately 10% of global production that is close to 100-million barrels per day.
This Yahoo news item repeats all the key facts in the Bloomberg ones that are paywalled, and icludes a useful map:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/major...075404268.html
The refineries hit recently seem to have typical throughputs of 100,000 - 300,000 barrels per day. So one can get to the 12% number just from forcing a shutdown of three refineries, but the issue is how quick can they do a restart, and how much damage is caused.
One of those attacks seemingly targeted a cracker in the refinery. If they got that (if) and if they penetrated it (if) whilst hot (if) in such a way as to cause a product explosion (if) then that might do long term damage that is not easy to repair. The larger the warheads get, the longer the drone ranges get, the better the targetting knowledge becomes, the more accurate the final strike becomes, the greater the likelihood of doing substantial lasting damage.
This has consequences for civilian fuels use in Russia, military fuels use in Russia, Russian exports of both crude and refined product (in different ways, complex), and Russian economy. Global economy will barely notice it.
They are also going after significant metals production facilities, again striking at particular bits of kit. I expect that other energy/power assets will be on their targetting list.
Cumulatively this will all have an effect. Whether it is sufficient in the current context remains to be seen.