The Scheherazade yacht in the port of Carrara, May 4, 2022.
(Gaia Pianigiani, The New Yor k Times / Contrasto)
Only Russian oil arrives at the Isab refinery in Priolo, in the province of Syracuse, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The plant is controlled by the Russian oil company Lukoil through the Swiss company Litasco, based in Geneva. Before the start of the conflict only 15 percent of the 320,000 barrels of crude oil that arrive here every day were imported from Russia. After February 24, the share of Russian oil rose to one hundred percent, because Italian banks blocked credit lines, preventing purchases on international markets and forcing it to obtain supplies from the parent company.
The Financial Times wrote that in the month of May 2022 alone, 450,000 barrels of Russian oil were unloaded in Italian ports, four times more than last year. Two thirds of these were destined for the Isab refinery in Priolo, in the province of Syracuse. Then, on the night between 30 and 31 May, the European council decided to suspend all imports of Russian oil by sea by the end of the year. With bank loans blocked and the end of imports from Russia, from January 1, 2023 the main Italian refinery, with a refining capacity of 19.4 million tons of crude oil per year and 22.2 percent of Italian refining , will be forced to stop production.
In Sicily, there is a fear of what the center-right president of the region Nello Musumeci calls “a social bomb”. One thousand people work at Isab, another two thousand are employed in related companies, but the closure of Lukoil could bring with it the entire petrochemical center, which includes an Eni chemical plant, an Algerian Sonatrach refinery and a plant of liquid gas production of the French Air Liquide. “They would all fall like skittles, since they work in an integrated way,” Fiorenzo Amato, secretary of Filctem-Cgil in Syracuse, explained to the Essential. The industrial area of Augusta, Melilli and Priolo has a total turnover of 1.1 billion euros, more than half of the gross domestic product of the province of Syracuse, and employs about eight thousand workers.
Waiting for remediation
Its closure would be a social disaster. Less from the environmental one. The industrial area has long been contested by ecologists for the high incidence of tumors among workers and inhabitants of neighboring municipalities. Already in 2000 the area between Syracuse and Augusta was included among the 48 super-polluted sites to be reclaimed located on the Italian territory.
“The soils are contaminated with heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (pcb), asbestos. Pyrite ashes were buried on the coast and even under the sports fields built in the seventies in Priolo and Augusta. The water tables are contaminated. Sea water and sediments in the bay of Augusta, in the peninsula of Magnisi and in the Porto Grande and Porto Piccolo of Syracuse are polluted by oil, heavy metals (including mercury and lead), heavy hydrocarbons and hexachlorobenzene “, wrote Marina Forti on Internazionale online . In 2019, a report from the Higher Institute of Health denounced the excessive mortality linked to pollution, not only caused by oil. However, the reclamations have never been seen.
On the afternoon of May 31, at the Ministry of Economic Development in via XX Settembre in Rome, an informal meeting was held on the Priolo petrochemical plant. The meeting was convened by Deputy Minister Alessandra Todde, of the 5-star Movement, which is responsible for industrial crises. The mayors of the municipalities involved, the representatives of Confindustria, the trade unions, the Oil Union and the Sicily region participated, asking for the opening of a crisis table with the aim of obtaining resources for reindustrialisation or for productive conversion .
However, the meeting was deserted by the League’s minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, who works separately at home with his deputy in the offices of via XX Settembre, as the trade unionists who in recent months have participated in the various tables on corporate crises well know. At the end, the ministry for economic development (Mise) made it known, in a note released to the press agencies, that “it is ready to evaluate the declaration of a complex crisis area”. A generic formula that allows the government to take its time and leaves the door open to any option to save the largest Italian refinery.
There would be at least three options on Minister Giorgetti’s table. The first is the use of the so-called golden power, a legal instrument that allows the state to intervene in sectors considered strategic to protect the national interest. This would be a de facto nationalization which, however, the Northern League exponent would prefer to avoid. The second is an agreement with the owners to sell the refinery, a solution that could be appreciated by the latter given the impossibility of using Russian oil and the difficulties created by economic sanctions. The latest hypothesis is that the government acts as a guarantor for oil supply contracts from non-Russian sources, allowing Lukoil to circumvent the blockade. It would be the quickest solution and for this reason it is the most appreciated by Filctem-CGIL, which asks the government to intervene on the banks “to reopen the credit lines currently blocked due to sanctions”, to allow Isab to buy crude oil on other markets. “However, it is not certain that Lukoil is interested in running a refinery that does not use Russian oil,” admits trade unionist Amato.
The left-wing parliamentary group ManifestA makes it known that “it will urge the minister of the economy to take a position on the whole affair, to prevent an uncontrollable escalation of depressive policies on the economy and to safeguard current levels of employment and income”.
The CGIL has instead called for a demonstration of workers in front of the refinery for Friday 10 June. It will be the first time since, in July 2019, the prefect of Syracuse Luigi Pizzi had banned the “gatherings” in front of the petrochemical. In the hearing at the TAR to discuss the appeal filed by the unions against the ordinance, a letter had appeared in which the Russian ambassador Sergej Razov asked the then interior minister Matteo Salvini to prohibit the blockades of the unions at the gates, which would have caused millions of euros in losses and damage to Lukoil’s reputation. The letter began with a friendly “dear Matteo”.