BRUSSELS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Europe's oil refiners areadopting the wily and flexible ways of traders to ensuresurvival as the sector faces further shrinkage, delegates at anindustry conference said.
Hard times have pushed them to pick and choose from a widerrange of crudes, ferry feedstock between their own refineries toget the optimal mix of products and seek out deeper discountsfrom suppliers.
"Commercial operations need to be totally, fully integratedwith the technical aspects," Dario Scaffardi, general manager ofItalian refiner Saras told the Platts refining summit."It's been the single most important thing that we'veconcentrated on. You have to look for the most challengingcrudes."
Scaffardi said his refinery processed 30-35 different typesof crude oil in 2015 - double the previous year.
The U.S. shale oil revolution changed flows of oil worldwideand pushed some crudes, such as Nigeria's light sweet oil, outof its traditional markets and forced sellers of heavier,harder-to-process oils to slash prices in order to securebuyers.
The strategy follows similar moves from Shell andTotal, which are bringing refining and tradingoperations closer together to drive profits amid falling oilprices and as independent trading houses impinge on theirbusiness.
Refiners at the conference said that while their industryfaces a punishing decade, with more closures to come, the newpalette of crudes available can keep agile European plants alivewhile their less adaptable competitors face the axe.
While some 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of refiningcapacity have shut down since 2009, Goran Saravanja, strategydevelopment director with Croatian refinery INA, said as much as25 percent more of Europe's refining would still need to closeover the next 15 years. [ID: nL2N0XD0CR]
INA itself, Saravanja said, plans to operate justone refining site in the long term, though the Croatiangovernment, a company shareholder, has blocked permanent closureof its Sisak refinery.
Europe's refineries are ageing, and poorly configured,producing mostly gasoline, while its buyers want diesel.
A five-year high in gasoline demand in the United States,which helped support Europe's refinery margins, is now ebbing,the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Tim Hess told theconference, and will remain largely flat over the coming year.
Lars Thorstholm, asset optimization manager with Norway'sStatoil, said his firm had also taken steps in the pastyear to experiment with different crudes, and leaves it to theteam trading oil - those with a front-line view of which oilgrades can bring the most value in any given market environment- to make the most of the company's refining.
"It is the trading arm who is responsible for optimizing therefinery," Thorstholm said.
His company, a producer of North Sea crude oil, said it hadeven chartered a vessel this year to use as floating storage inorder to increase operational flexibility. (Reporting By Libby George, editing by William Hardy)