June 12, 2012 [Bloomberg] - Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Royal Vopak NV and Greenergy Ltd. have jointly bid to operate the Coryton oil refinery in the U.K. as a storage terminal, according to a union spokesman.
The companies have offered to convert the Coryton plant, owned by Petroplus Holdings AG before it filed for insolvency this year, into tank storage, Russ Ball, an official at Unite, the U.K.’s largest labor union whose members include workers at the refinery, said today by phone from Basildon, England.
Other companies are interested in keeping the site as a refinery, he said. Shell, Vopak and Greenergy all declined to comment on the matter when contacted today.
The process of shutting the Coryton unit began on June 6 and the refinery was expected to be out of production by today or tomorrow, Ball said last week. The plant could process 175,000 barrels of crude a day and supplied 20 percent of London and the southeast region’s fuel consumption, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
A spokeswoman at Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP, administrators for Petroplus in the U.K., said it was “still talking with potential purchasers and is keeping the options open, taking each bid on its merits.” She declined to be identified or to comment on individual bids.
Workers from the Coryton plant protested today outside the nearby Exxon Mobil Corp. terminal in Purfleet after yesterday demonstrating at the Vopak facility in the same town, Ball said.
