Mongstad is an industrial site in

Vestland Vestland is a county in Norway established on 1 January 2020. The county is located in Western Norway and it is centred around the city of Bergen, Norway's second largest city. The administrative centre of the county is the city of Bergen, where t ...

county,

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

. The site sits on the border of the municipalities of Alver and

Austrheim Austrheim is a municipality in the Nordhordland region of Vestland county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Årås. Other villages in the municipality include Austrheim and Kaland. The Mongstad industrial ...

, with most of the site in Alver. The site features an

oil refinery An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refined into useful products such as gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, asphalt base, fuel oils, heating oil, kerosene, lique ...

for

Equinor Equinor ASA (formerly Statoil and StatoilHydro) is a Norwegian state-owned multinational energy company headquartered in Stavanger. It is primarily a petroleum company, operating in 36 countries with additional investments in renewable energy. I ...

and other

oil companies The following is a list of notable companies in the petroleum industry that are engaged in petroleum exploration and production. The list is in alphabetical order by continent and then by country. This list does not include companies only involved ...

, including

Shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

. At Mongstad, Equinor has a crude oil

terminal Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output dev ...

with a capacity of . The

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

at Mongstad is the largest in Norway, measured in

tonnage Tonnage is a measure of the cargo-carrying capacity of a ship, and is commonly used to assess fees on commercial shipping. The term derives from the taxation paid on ''tuns'' or casks of wine. In modern maritime usage, "tonnage" specifically r ...

. The refinery at Mongstad is modern, and has been extensively upgraded, with a capacity of 12 million tonnes of crude oil per year (230,000 barrels per day). The refinery is the largest in Norway, though medium-sized by European standards. It is owned by a company called Mongstad Refining, in which Equinor has whole ownership (since 2012).Statoil - Mongstad Facilities
/ref> All the crude oil refined at Mongstad comes from the

North Sea The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea, epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the ...

. The largest production is

petrol Gasoline (; ) or petrol (; ) (see ) is a transparent, petroleum-derived flammable liquid that is used primarily as a fuel in most spark-ignited internal combustion engines (also known as petrol engines). It consists mostly of organic c ...

diesel Diesel may refer to: * Diesel engine, an internal combustion engine where ignition is caused by compression * Diesel fuel, a liquid fuel used in diesel engines * Diesel locomotive, a railway locomotive in which the prime mover is a diesel engin ...

, jet fuel, and light petroleum products. The heaviest components are used to make petrol coke, an important ingredient in anodes for

aluminum Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. It ha ...

production. In 2010, Equinor and Ørsted opened the Mongstad Power Station, a

natural gas Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbo ...

-fired

thermal power plant A thermal power station is a type of power station in which heat energy is converted to electrical energy. In a steam-generating cycle heat is used to boil water in a large pressure vessel to produce high-pressure steam, which drives a steam ...

, to provide the site with heat energy and

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as describ ...

, as well as power to the

Troll gas field Troll is a natural gas and oil field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, one of the biggest in the North Sea, holding 40% of Norway’s gas – it also possesses significant quantities of oil, in thin zones under the gas cap, to the west of ...

History

The first use of the site was in 1975, when Statoil opened its refinery. At the end of the 1980s, the refinery was expanded to the tune of , resulting in the Mongstad scandal after a overexpenditure on the facility, costing several Statoil executives their jobs. In the time of the "Mongstad scandal" as it was called, a "Mong" was colloquially used as a term to represent the amount of . Statoil built a natural gas-fired thermal power plant at Mongstad in 2010. The carbon dioxide emissions that were predicted to result aroused public controversy as the project was being built.

External links

References

Oil refineries in Norway Ports and harbours of Norway Equinor Norsk Hydro Alver (municipality) Austrheim Oil terminals {{Vestland-geo-stub