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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 868 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 10 November 2020 by Mrs L.M. Harvey

Parliament: 40 Session: 1

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.