Given the fact Russian-EU oil trade was running at 40-45m bbl per week before the invasion, I don’t think the loss of 3.5m bbl production per week is really not an issue since the Russians would have ample idle capacity they can bring online quickly to offset the loss. Also, as the Ukrainians themselves know full well, oil refineries are hard targets, built tough and difficult to kill. The Russians will repair the damage quickly enough. The Russian economy is reliant on oil revenue. If they were seriously vulnerable, the Ukrainians would have been hitting them from the get go and consistently, not two years in. These attacks are more of the same from Ukraine now. Showy media focused with limited practical value.
Russia has 44 refineries in 2022. It is entirely possible for Ukraine to maintain pressure like this, which could cause serious problems for the Russians.
They produce 7 million barrels/day. And they are already producing high levels of diesel for the war. In 2022 there was only an excess of 900 thousand barrels per day. (production 7 million/day). Some of these refineries obviously need to undergo maintenance every X months, otherwise they risk having serious problems.
So if the Ukrainian bombing campaign continues, things could start to get problematic for Russia.
The current campaign differs from the 2022-2023 campaign because now the focus has been on distillation and production towers. And no more storage tanks.
Furthermore, if Ukraine continues to destroy 5 or more distillation towers per month, they have real power to destroy the Russian refining industry. Currently they are destroying much more than that. Apart from other secondary targets.
A simple refinery to produce 100 thousand barrels/day. It costs 3 billion dollars. No sanctions obviously. Russian production today is 7 million barrels/day.
The manufacturing time for a distillation tower + Installation is in the range of 1 year. I know of one of a company that lost its tower due to a fire that found this 1 year unacceptable.
After appealing to the Americans, the time was reduced to 6 months. He also found it unacceptable. We traveled the world to speed up the process. They reduced it to an absurd cost for 3 months.
And this without sanctions and opening your wallet to jump the queue and everything else. Therefore, even in the best case scenario, Russia will have problems replacing certain parts of its refineries. And it is prohibitive to repair dozens of refineries.
Added to the fact that they need to stop from time to time to clean and maintain the tower. Something that you can't escape because otherwise the tower will break. Here is a recipe for the disaster that Russia would need to resolve. If this is not resolved, the increase in fuel prices will affect the price of all products that use gasoline directly and/or indirectly. From heating to food. And inflation will increase.
Russia is really suffering from these attacks. The problem itself is that even if they contain anti-aircraft protection measures in the refineries, the Ukrainians are attacking with swarms of drones that will saturate the systems, probably due to Ukraine's greater drone production capabilities and deliveries from the West that were promised.
