Not sunset for Singapore's oil refineries

CLEARLY, no oil refinery today is too big to fail. Just a while ago, the Australians were lamenting the closure of their refineries by the super majors like Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron - pointing, as the reason, to the bigger and more competitive Asian refineries like those in Singapore and South Korea.

But Shell recently also took the unprecedented step of writing off (even if only in the accounting sense) its 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) Bukom refinery - which, capacity-wise, is the largest …