Deutsche Welle, using the city of Schwedt as a case study, reports on the likely repercussions if madness prevails and a total raw oil import embargo is imposed against Russia.
Located in Brandenburg, near the German border with Poland, Schwedt serves as the German center of crude oil — at least for eastern Germany. Some 90% of the region’s refined petroleum products come from the local PCK refinery, which transforms Russian crude oil into nearly 20 different products.
The Russian crude arrives directly by pipeline, and the plant is designed around its high sulfur content. Conversion to different types of crude oil would be costly and time-consuming. “If the refinery in Schwedt is no longer supplied with Russian oil, nothing will run in large parts of eastern Germany,” an insider told Handelsblatt, Deutsche Welle reports.
The town processes over one third of Germany’s oil imports from Russia, which add up, nationwide, to over one billion euros’ worth.
Although Germany does have an oil reserve that could theoretically allow Germany to refrain from Russian oil imports for 200 days, the means of distributing the reserves are inefficient, and different refineries are optimized for different types of crude oil.
