This post is hand-written. AI helped with data and visuals. The completely unnecessary rabbit hole is 100% organic.

A few months ago, I came across a blog post from the amazing Ed Conway (available also as a video) explaining why the USA hostilities against Venezuela are likely due to crude oil access. According to Ed, it turns out that the most of American refineries require a crude oil with high density that can be found in just a few countries, like Venezuela. This makes USA sensible to heavy crude supply risk by this handful of countries and that's likely affecting foreign policy in their side of the oceans.

Is Italy, my home-country, exposed to the same risk? Does Italian refineries require a specific type of oil? For historic reason, Italian refining capacity is much more flexible the American one. USA refining capacity focused on developing technologies that could apply to the heavy crude that was the first exploited in big numbers. On the other hand, Italy, due to its position in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, imported crude oil comes from a broader set of countries, each delivering crude oil with its own characteristics.

Whilst for USA is very easy to perform such analysis because of the excellent data published regularly by U.S. Energy Information Adiministration (EIA), for Italy those data aren't available which means that it needs some deeper dive-in.

Here it is what I found out from a technical point of view:

Types of oil

There are many factors base on which it is possible to distinguish crude oil. The one taken into account for this rabbit hole is the API gravity, which measures crude oil density compared to water. Hence:

Types of refineries

Different densities of crude oil requires different refining process and refinery's architecture. The heavier the oil, the more difficult is to refine, requiring dedicate processes to be implemented in the plant.

The following processes indicate capability to handle heavy to extra-heavy crudes (API < 22.3°):

Process Crude Type Function
Residue Hydroconversion Unit (RHU) Heavy/Extra-Heavy Converts heavy vacuum residues into lighter products using hydrogen under high pressure and temperature
Coking Heavy/Extra-Heavy Thermal cracking of heaviest residues into coke and lighter hydrocarbons, handles bottom-of-barrel material
Lummus Chevron-Finer (LC-Finer) Extra-Heavy Advanced hydroconversion technology specifically designed to upgrade very heavy residues using ebullated-bed reactor
Deasphalting Heavy/Extra-Heavy Solvent extraction process that separates asphaltenes from heavy residues, producing deasphalted oil feedstock
Visbreaking Heavy Mild thermal cracking that reduces viscosity of heavy residues, producing more valuable lighter products
Hydrocracking (full conversion) Heavy Catalytic cracking with hydrogen that breaks heavy molecules into lighter products under severe conditions

Refineries in Italy

Here is a list of Italian refineries. For each I collected the processes installed based on which I tried to understand the type of oil processed there. In the table, I stated only the heaviest because, in general, light crude oil can still be refined in heavy crude oil facilities, whilst the opposite cannot happen.

Refinery Location Capacity (Mt/year) Main Processes Installed Heaviest Crude Oil Processed
ENI - Sannazzaro Pavia 10 Crude distillation (2 units), FCC, Hydrocracking (2 units + EST), Visbreaking, Deasphalting, Desulfurization (3 units) Extra Heavy
ENI - Taranto Taranto 6.5 RHU (Residue Hydroconversion), Two-stage Visbreaking, Distillation Heavy
ENI - Gela Caltanissetta 5 FCC with go-finer, Coking (2 units), Distillation Heavy
ENI/Kuwait - Milazzo Messina 10 Distillation (2 units), FCC, Distillate Hydrocracking, LC-Finer Extra Heavy
ISAB (GOI Energy) - Priolo Siracusa 16 Distillation (320k bpd), Vacuum dist., FCC, Catalytic Hydrocracking, Hydrotreating, IGCC Medium
Sonatrach - Augusta Siracusa 10 Distillation, Conversion (limited details) Medium
SARAS - Sarroch Cagliari 15 Distillation (2 units), Enhanced FCC, MHC (2 units), Visbreaking, CCR Reforming, IGCC Heavy
SARPOM (ExxonMobil) - Trecate Novara 9 Distillation, Standard secondary processes Medium
API - Falconara Ancona 4 Distillation, FCC, Visbreaking Heavy
ENI - Livorno Livorno 4.2 Converting to biorefinery N/A
IPLOM - Busalla Genova 2 Crude distillation, Limited processes Medium
Alma Petroli - Ravenna Ravenna 0.5 Crude distillation Light

Italy refining capacity is much more flexible and has a better coverage of different API density, whilst the top 10 refineries for capacity in the USA are all focused on heavy crude.

Why American heavy-crude oil facilities aren't used for processing lighter oil

There a few reasons why this is not possible:

  1. Refinery Configuration Lock-in US Gulf Coast refineries were built/upgraded decades ago (especially 1990s-2000s) specifically to process heavy Canadian and Mexican crude because it was cheaper. These are complex refineries with coking, visbreaking, etc. While they can technically process light crude, it would be economically wasteful - like using a supercomputer as a calculator.

  2. Economics of Complexity

    • Heavy crude is cheaper to buy ($/barrel) but yields more valuable products after complex processing
    • Light crude commands premium prices internationally
    • US refineries profit more by: buying cheap heavy crude → processing it → selling products, WHILE exporting expensive light shale crude to simpler refineries abroad (Europe, Asia)

  3. Product Slate Optimization Heavy crude processing yields different product ratios (more diesel, less gasoline) than light crude. US refineries optimized for heavy crude produce the specific product mix that matches their market contracts and infrastructure.

  4. Infrastructure and Logistics Pipelines, storage, and refinery configurations are fixed investments. It's not economically viable to reconfigure a $10+ billion refinery complex just because domestic crude composition changed with the shale boom.

So the answer: It's more profitable to export light crude at premium prices and import cheap heavy crude for complex refineries, even though it seems counterintuitive from a self-sufficiency perspective.

References

For refineries details:

For heavy crude oil processes: