KWINANA OIL REFINERY — CLOSURE
868. Mrs L.M. HARVEY to the Premier:
Can the Premier outline the economic impacts of the closure
of BP's Kwinana oil refinery, including the economic and employment
consequences for the local producers that truck condensate to the refinery and
for businesses that rely on the range of outputs from the refinery for their
production?
Mr M. McGOWAN
replied:
As I said last week, we were very disappointed by BP's
decision to close the refinery. The refinery has been there since the sod was
turned in the early 1950s by Sir Ross McLarty, and, obviously, it has been a staple
of the Kwinana industrial strip for the last 65 years. The impact is on the
people who work there. There are around 400 employees and 200 contractors. That has come down significantly in recent years. I
remember when I was first elected here that 2 000 people worked there.
Obviously, with technology, and perhaps with demand, the number of people
working there has declined.
We have been advised that
COVID-19 has had a significant impact because there has been a decline in
demand for some sorts of fuel that the refinery produces, in particular
aviation fuel, and that has hastened the demise of refining at the refinery.
The most important thing is that the workforce is treated well and that we seek
to find alternatives for the workers. The Rockingham Jobs and Skills Centre
will engage with the people there. We have worked with, and spoken to, BP about
appropriate redundancy packages for those people who are losing their
employment. We also want to keep—this
is very important—the capacity for the refinery to be a reception point
or an import terminal for fuel supplies into the state, and we have
guaranteed that.
This is not a decision of
the government's making. As I told members last week, one refinery in
Brisbane has closed, the refining
capacity in Sydney has gone, the Adelaide refinery at Port Stanvac has closed
and, from memory, one of the Melbourne refineries has gone. This appears
to be happening, and I am advised that it is because of the extraordinarily
large refineries that are now being constructed in the region. The price of
fuel produced by those refineries is significantly less than the price of fuel
produced by the BP refinery.
Although we are
disappointed, we have worked to secure the future of fuel sources into the
state and also the future, as best we
can, of the workforce. There will continue to be somewhere in the vicinity of
100 people employed there. In terms of the oil or the condensate that
comes out of Western Australia and goes into the refinery, it is less than one
per cent of what the refinery actually refines, so 99 per cent is imported.