Output down over 14% already, and those towers are hard to replace

no, but these are some of the bigger ones

recent two strikes on kaluga (yesterday) and slaviansk-on-kuban (today) also were refineries, but smaller ones so these aren’t on charts like this

How do you have any sense of scale here, some kind of industry experience?

You can’t fool me, you just made those words up didn’t you

Seriously though I have no idea. It seems every day there’s new refineries exploding, I can’t keep up. I got this chart from https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA

depends on what was hit

in every oil refinery, there’s main fractionating column. distillation in this thing is the first thing (after drying and filtering out sand and such) that happens to crude. all of crude goes through this stage, when it’s out refinery can’t accept new crude and must rely on stockpiled distillate for manufacture of products. it’s a massive often custom made tube that can be few meters in diameter and few tens of meters in height. lead times on this thing are somewhere about year now, it’s filled with plates that look like this

https://www.wermac.org/equipment/equipment_img/distillation_column8.jpg

every plate has to be even, level and sealed on edges to the column. i’m not sure how long repairs can take, but i wouldn’t be surprised that it’ll be in months, maybe more with repair techs now busy with many columns to patch up. there are other places that would be very harmful for operation of refinery if hit, but distillation tower is a big one and easy to target as it’s one of tallest structures. some of these reactors are also basically used for upgrading whatever is distilled out in main tower, so in return for some degradation in quality refinery can still pump out fuel if at lower efficiency (catalytic reformer, hydrodesulfurization unit, cracking unit, delayed coker) but not some chemical intermediates. this is not the case when the first step is disabled

another big one is vacuum distillating tower, which is similar but wider and runs at reduced pressure. this one outputs heavier things like fuel oils and lubricants. i think that at this step at least some of trays are more often replaced by packed bed, which can be either pellets with special shape or a kind of 3d mesh. i don’t think the latter one is repairable at all if hit by drone

this is not what always happened, in at least one case pipeline was hit and that refinery was stopped only for day. in at least few of recent strikes it was specifically main distillation tower that was damaged

as of somewhere last week 12% of russian oil processing capacity was disabled. it’s probably more now, and it can be mitigated by increasing production in remaining plants and some more advanced logistics. russia never had problems with that right?

Damaged, I think.

And by “damaged” I think they’re mostly offline for a day or two, but I haven’t seen any follow-up reporting.

Chernobyl is in Ukraine