Suffering from corrosion and leaks, the Donges refinery is suspended

France’s second largest refinery, the Donges site, has been “completely shut down for more than a week” due to “corrosion and leakage”, a CGT representative of the TotalEnergy refinery near Saint-Pierre announced on Friday. – Nazir.

Fabian Prive Saint-Lain, general secretary of the CGT inside the refinery, declared that “this is a technical stop” imposed from February 20 by the regional directorate of environment, planning and housing (DRILL).

“Maintenance and Maintenance Activities”

“Currently, there are corrosion problems and leaks, there is a blockage on an oven (…) but 32,000 kilometers of piping have to be redone” at this SEVESO site at the high threshold, said Fabian Prive Saint-Lain. The leaks do not represent an environmental risk to the site’s environment, he said, estimating that the refinery will resume its activities “in a month at the end of March.”

Half of the refinery’s installations had already been shut down since mid-December following a formal notice from the Loire-Atlantique prefecture, which ordered TotalEnergies to “respect the provisions for the pipes (…)”. A Total Energy spokesman said the outage was due to “maintenance and maintenance activities that are required”.

“All these actions currently represent a cost of around 50 million euros per year,” he added, “they have put in place very significant means to ensure the safety of the site (of the installations)”. For Fabien Privé Saint-Lanne, the shutdown of the refinery is reversed due to a “policy of low-cost maintenance and upkeep”.

“Employees are understaffed”

“Employees are understaffed and work 12, sometimes 16 hours straight (…) which is dangerous,” lamented the union representative. The French giant has not paid salaries to nearly twenty foreign employees, including nine Ukrainians, since December, CGT also denounced in a press release on Friday.

According to the TotalEnergies website, the Donges platform, which covers an area of ​​about 350 hectares and employs 650 employees, is the second refinery in France after Normandy. It has the capacity to process 11 million tonnes of crude per year for a storage capacity of 2.2 million m3 (crude oil and finished products) according to the same source.