The average refinery in a developed country is old.
Very old.
Vienna’s Schwechat refinery is an unusually good example. It was built shortly after the Second World War and was originally intended, if I understand the history correctly, as something of a temporary solution. The temporary facility became permanent.
Today, it is an industrial installation approaching eighty years of age.
Of course, it is not the same refinery it was in the late 1940s.
Over those decades it has been upgraded, modified, expanded and overhauled repeatedly. New processes have been added. Technology has improved. Equipment has been replaced. The configuration has changed to accommodate different crude slates, products, environmental requirements and market conditions.
But underneath all of that remains the basic industrial skeleton of a facility that has been operating for considerably more than half a century.
And Schwechat is not some bizarre exception.
It is simply an unusually visible example of a much broader phenomenon.
Most refineries in the developed world are measured in decades rather than years.
There is a reason for this.
We have made building new industrial infrastructure so difficult that, in many parts of the developed world, it has become close to impossible.
The regulatory process is long, complicated, unpredictable and extraordinarily expensive. Permitting can take years. Environmental assessments multiply. Legal challenges can delay projects indefinitely. Requirements change during the process. Costs accumulate before the first piece of equipment is even installed.
Eventually somebody asks the obvious question:
Why build it here?
And increasingly, the answer has been: don’t.
Move the processing somewhere else.
This coincided rather conveniently with the ambitions of oil-producing countries. Exporting crude is one thing. Exporting refined products is another. Refining allows producers to move further up the value chain, capture more of the margin and develop their own industrial base.
So the arrangement suited everyone.
The developed world stopped building much new refining capacity.
The oil-producing world built more of it.
And the old refineries in Europe, North America and elsewhere continued operating.
They were upgraded. They were optimised. They were kept compliant. They became more efficient.
But they remained old.
For decades, that worked well enough.
Until it didn’t.
Because an industrial system designed around a large number of functioning routes, facilities and supply chains becomes vulnerable when one of those routes disappears.
A chokepoint becomes difficult to pass.
A refinery goes offline.
A pipeline is disrupted.
A shipping route becomes unavailable.
Suddenly everyone discovers that the remaining infrastructure does not have the spare capacity it was assumed to have.
The old clunkers cannot simply absorb the missing capacity.
They were never sufficient to replace the entire system.
And they have not been sufficient for decades.
We knew this.
We simply preferred not to think about it.
There was an ideological convenience in moving industrial activity elsewhere. We could close, restrict or refuse new infrastructure at home and congratulate ourselves for having become cleaner, greener and more virtuous.
The fact that somebody else still had to refine the oil did not seem to disturb the narrative.
We did not eliminate the industrial activity.
We exported it.
And now the consequences of that choice are becoming harder to hide.
When global supply chains work perfectly, this arrangement looks efficient.
When they don’t, the weakness becomes painfully obvious.
We have allowed critical industrial infrastructure to age while simultaneously making its replacement increasingly difficult. We have reduced redundancy and then congratulated ourselves for reducing the footprint.
That is not resilience.
It is dependency dressed up as virtue.
And eventually the bill for that hypocrisy arrives.
The refinery may be old.
The problem is considerably newer.
It is the decision not to build the next one.
https://boereport.com/2026/08/17/oil-shocks-bigger-problem-is-at-the-refinery/