Power Outage Hits Port of Rotterdam; Issue Resolved

A power outage in the Rotterdam port area in the Netherlands briefly interrupted operations at one of Europe's biggest oil refineries on Tuesday, the plant's operator BP said.

Electricity grid operator TenneT said the problem was solved shortly after 1000 GMT. It said that BP's 400,000 barrels per day oil refinery, Europe's second largest, was among the plants affected, together with smaller plants and the rail network in the region.

BP confirmed the power failure had impacted the plant, but later said it was resuming operations.

Rotterdam is one of the world's biggest crude and fuel refining and storage hubs, housing Europe's largest oil refinery, Shell's 404,000 bpd Pernis plant.

A Shell spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the refinery was hit by the outage.

A source familiar with the plant's operations said the power outage caused a brief disruption on a small unit, but that operations had returned to normal.

Dutch environmental agency DCMR said in a statement on Tuesday that the power outage affected some refineries in the area, leading to flaring.

Gas flaring is a safety measure practiced by refineries to release the buildup of pressure when a unit experiences an upset.

A spokespoerson for ExxonMobil, which operates a 190,000 bpd refinery in the area, said the plant was not impacted.

VTTI's oil storage terminal in the Europoort area of the port resumed normal operations after being affected for a few hours, a spokesperson told Reuters.

The grid operator said it was investigating what had caused the outage in the area of Europe's largest sea port, which houses major oil refineries and chemical plants.

The Rotterdam port said traffic was not affected.

(Reuters - Reporting by Bart Meijer, Ron Bousso, Ahmad Ghaddar and Robert Harvey, Editing by Louise Heavens and Sharon Singleton)