With Coryton closing, don’t expect cheap petrol

If you thought it was pricey filling up the car this morning, just give it a day or two.

Not 24 hours after the ante gets upped way over yonder on the Straits of Hormuz, the world’s great oil tanker sea lane, things are going wrong a little closer to home.

Just 28 miles east of London, the giant Coryton oil refinery is shutting down.

With it, say unions and the local MEP, could go around 1,000 jobs and 20 per cent of the petrol supply to London and south east England.

Also going – another piece in the jigsaw of the UK’s industrial landscape. It was back in 1895 that the firm Kynochs first began turning out cordite, gunpowder and cartridges from the flatlands of the Thames estuary site.

These days things have changed a bit on the site near Canvey Island site. The vast storage tanks appear like mushrooms, set against the intricate steaming pipe-nests of cracking plants, desulphurisation units and catalytic reformers – the language and architecture of turning crude oil into its myriad of extractable products.

That oil, nosing up the Thames in VLCCs of up to 250,000 tonnes deadweight. VLCCs? Very Large Crude Carriers, delicately nosed into berth by attendant tug vessels.

They come from all over – but many through the troubled Hormuz Straits where Iran and the west face off over the nuclear issue.

And now they arrive at a terminal that will soon fall silent. A casualty, owners Petroplus say, of cheaper Asian refining and European over-capacity (the latter perhaps an effect of the former).

So what now? Well, another oil giant could buy the plant perhaps. Refineries like Fawley near Southampton, and in Lincolnshire, could take up the strain.

But none of this is going to make filling up that tank any cheaper.

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