What happens if an oil refinery shuts down?

Question

What happens if an oil refinery shuts down?

Answer 1

No gas, no oil, no plastics.

Natural oil is a tarry substance that is useless unless it is refined.  An oil refinery uses various catalysts and cooks the raw oil at various temperatures to separate the various products from it.  The oil you pour into your car is not the oil that comes out of the ground.  Gasoline, diesel and other chemicals made from oil are brought out in different ways by the refinery process.

If you have a million barrels of oil flowing into the US, but only the refining capacity to process hundreds of barrels then you will only get a few hundred gallons of gasoline out of it.  The oil companies have been complaining about the damage from Hurricane Katrina that reduced the US oil refinery capacity.  However, despite their record profits they haven't tried to increase that capacity.  This way there is more demand and so they make more profit.

So if the oil refinery shuts down the raw oil sits in tanks unused and unuseable.

According to Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refiner...

"Raw or unprocessed ("crude") oil is not useful in the form it comes in out of the ground. Although "light, sweet" (low viscosity, low sulfur) oil has been used directly as a burner fuel for steam vessel propulsion, the lighter elements form explosive vapors in the fuel tanks and so it is quite dangerous, especially so in warships. For this and many other uses, the oil needs to be separated into parts and refined before use in fuels and lubricants, and before some of the byproducts could be used in petrochemical processes to form materials such as plastics, detergents, solvents, elastomers, and fibers such as nylon and polyesters. Petroleum fossil fuels are used in ship, automobile and aircraft engines. These different hydrocarbons have different boiling points, which means they can be separated by distillation. Since the lighter liquid elements are in great demand for use in internal combustion engines, a modern refinery will convert heavy hydrocarbons and lighter gaseous elements into these higher value products using complex and energy intensive processes....

Once separated and purified of any contaminants and impurities, the fuel or lubricant can be sold without any further processing. Smaller molecules such as isobutane and propylene or butylenes can be recombined to meet specific octane requirements of fuels by processes such as alkylation or less commonly, dimerization. Octane grade of gasoline can also be improved by catalytic reforming, which strips hydrogen out of hydrocarbons to produce aromatics, which have much higher octane ratings. Intermediate products such as gasoils can even be reprocessed to break a heavy, long-chained oil into a lighter short-chained one, by various forms of cracking such as fluid catalytic cracking, thermal cracking, and hydrocracking. The final step in gasoline production is the blending of fuels with different octane ratings, vapor pressures, and other properties to meet product specifications.

Oil refineries are large scale plants, processing from about a hundred thousand to several hundred thousand barrels of crude oil per day. Because of the high capacity, many of the units are operated continuously (as opposed to processing in batches) at steady state or approximately steady state for long periods of time (months to years). This high capacity also makes process optimization and advanced process control very desirable."

Answer 2

Depends on how it shuts down. A planned shutdown is done regularly to perform maintenance.

An emergency shutdown is a whole other thing. It will cost millions to clean out piping, pumps. furnaces and the like. Since it may cost the refinery manager his annual bonus, you can be sure that they want to avoid emergency shutdowns.