What I will believe is a well formed, researched and referenced article published on the matter.
In the absence of that here - then how about extracting some of the facts from an
EC Staff Working Paper that accompanied a '
COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS' dated 17 Nov 2010, titled
'Energy infrastructure priorities for 2020 and beyond - A Blueprint for an integrated European energy network'
Facts (as of the date of the paper):
'In the 1990s, when EU demand began to switch from gasoline to diesel, gradually more investment went into hydrocracking units, although catalytic crackers are still the dominant configuration in Europe'
'Fluid Catalytic Cracker (FCC) units were the main choice of European refineries in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a strong growth in demand for gasoline.'
'Conversion refineries such as FCCs [...] typically require more energy per unit of crude intake compared to hydroskimming refineries. They would therefore also generate more Green House Gases (GHG) per unit of crude oil intake.'
'Complex refineries are more energy intensive, and emit more CO2 than simple refineries. Every additional cracking process and every additional desulphurisation step needs energy and thus increases CO2 emissions.'
In summary, throughout the article there is a recognition that Refineries are a consumer of Energy as part of their process, not a contributor.
This is backed up by
'Ignasi Palou-Rivera, Jeongwoo Han, and Michael Wang' paper of 2011 that evidences the fact that US Petroleum Refineries were a consumer of 46,227,000,000 kWh of ELECTRICITY from external grids in 2010.
If the refineries were producing their own electricity as part of their processes, why did they buy in so much of it?