Attacking an Oil Production System

Its fascinating to see media outlets that normally obsess about small farm fields in the Donbas, waking up to the fact that the Ukrainians are systematically trying to disassemble Russia’s oil refining and distribution system. After mostly ignoring or dismissing these strategic attacks for years, indeed downplaying the benefits of ranged strike overall, it seems more and more people are catching on to what is happening. There was this quite interesting report yesterday in the BBC for instance.

I thought I would provide some overview information of what matters in these attacks, today focusing on why refineries are being attacked—and what matters in refinery attacks.

Refineries are being attacked because they are large, stationery and have key components that are very difficult to replace. In other words, if they are not being defended in depth (and Russian air defense looks rather uneven) they present high value targets for air attack with a relatively high chance of success—if you have accurate systems.

A refinery’s core mission is to take crude oil and break it down into its constituent parts. It is therefore made up of large storage/blending tanks and then different units to break the crude oil down and capture it as a range of different fuels. The most important part of this process occurs in what is called the main “cracker”, which is a distillation unit/column (someone I spoke to also called it a “cracking tank”, but that is a phrase that is not widely used).

The “cracker” boils the crude oil, and starting and the lighter fuels come off at the lower temperatures. Here is a useful chart from the US Energy Information Agency.

The “cracker” is the single most vulnerable part of a refinery. Without a main cracker, a refinery is basically useless, as it cannot begin the process of breaking crude down (note—some large refineries have multiple crackers, or one large cracker and then smaller ones for the different fuel capture).

Here is a schematic of a how a refinery processes crude into its constituent parts, the cracker is the blue distillation column which launches the process. Just note, there are many different configurations for a refinery, but they all need to have a distillation column.

Not only is the cracker invaluable to the functioning of the refinery, its an extremely expensive piece of equipment (made up of lots of high grade, very costly metals), and exceedingly difficult to replace. Its not like you can go down to Home Depot and buy one and refineries do not typically keep spare ones around because of their excessive cost.

And from what I understand, refineries are often built around the cracker, so getting a damaged one out and installing a new one basically means reconstructing much of the refinery.

What the Ukrainians seem to be doing more and more recently (say since August) is damaging or even destroying these crackers. They are usually located in the interior of the refinery so require some accuracy to hit—but that seems to be what the Ukrainians are trying to do (and looking at the drop of Russian refinery production—they are doing with some success).

Here is a picture of the Yaroslavl refinery which was hit in Russia two days ago—the fire and smoke are coming from the interior of the refinery—which is what the Ukrainians want.

If you contrast this attack with what the Ukrainians were doing earlier in the year (below picture is from an attack in February) they are definitely being more precise.

It seems many of the earlier attacks hit the storage or blending tanks where crude or refined oils were being stored—such as those above. Now these tanks burn impressively and shoot flames high in the sky—but they are (or so I have been told) not that difficult to replace and do not represent a long-term threat to the functioning of the refinery. The oil, for instance, can be stored in pipelines and the like.

And refineries have lots of these tanks, often ringing the cracker, storing the fuels in their different stages. Here is a schematic of a refinery showing a possible layout.

So it might have been that many of the earlier pictures of refineries burning with massive flames came from attacks which did not hit the vital distillation process but actually hit different storage tanks.

Now the attacks are definitely hitting Russian refining capacity in depth. The Russian state has banned the sale of refined oil until the end of the year, moreover the Russians are talking about buying a great deal of refined oil from China and other states (which might have been Russian crude exported to Asia in the first place).

In other words, the Russians now seem to lack the functioning refining capacity to provide refined fuels to their own economy at present.

Now, that does not mean Russia is not making money from its oil. It still can, and is, exporting a great deal of unrefined, crude oil through its shadow fleet. That is actually what states like China, India and Turkey are doing—buying Russian crude in large quantities and refining it themselves. So to shut down all sources of income, the Ukrainians would have to go after the pipelines, pumping systems and port infrastructure that handles crude exports.

There are signs that they are starting to do this—so I will definitely write more about that in the future. But for now, I thought you might find this description of refinery attacks and what they can accomplish (and what they cannot accomplish) useful.