In an attempt to sell his support for a total ban on oil imports from Russia, German Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) recently went to Schwedt, on the German-Polish border, the site of PCK, the nation’s biggest oil refinery complex. There, Habeck spoke of turning PCK into a “refinery of the future” that does without oil and uses “green hydrogen” instead. Asking the Habeck ministry for details of this concept, the web journal Telepolis received no answer, nor did it get more from the Brandenburg Ministry of Economics, except for the note that a time frame of eight to ten years is assumed for the transformation of Schwedt, and that after all, not the government but the industry and the refinery itself were to work out a concept.
PCK not only produces for the gasoline sector, where it predominantly supplies Eastern Germany and will not easily be substituted, it also produces one-third of all bitumen needed for road-building in Germany. The refinery is specialized on the heavy oil from Russia, it cannot easily switch, as the Greens claim, to other brands of oil which would require massive investments for the transformation.
PCK is one of the remaining big industry complexes in Germany’s east, therefore the uncertainty of its future in an era without Russian oil is threatening several thousand jobs. Another giant blow against the real economy of Germany’s east, after the decree on a total exit from lignite mining which will kill 20,000 jobs in the Lausitz region, and several thousand jobs lost in the refinery complex at Leuna, where Russian gas is transformed into other preproducts for the industry—including “blue hydrogen” at affordable costs which the Greens however defame as “dirty hydrogen.”
