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US energy company Phillips 66 has agreed to buy a UK oil refinery that was shut after its owner went into insolvency last year, but said it will not reopen as a standalone entity a facility that once produced about a tenth of Britain’s fuel.
The refinery and petrol station owner said on Monday that the Lindsey oil refinery in north-east England, which was previously owned by challenger company Prax Group, was not viable for “standalone refinery operations” due to “limitations of its scale, facilities and capabilities”.
Phillips 66 said it would “integrate key assets” in the site to the neighbouring Humber refinery that it also owns, and which would benefit from Lindsey’s “storage and other infrastructure assets”. Phillips 66 did not say which assets it planned to use, or disclose how much it had paid for them.
The decision not to resume operations at the site, which processed about 96,600 barrels of oil per day in 2024, means the UK is set to lose more of its oil refining capacity. Lindsey was one of five refineries left in Britain after Petroineos — owned by PetroChina and Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos — stopped refining operations at Grangemouth in Scotland last year.
Sharon Graham, secretary-general of the Unite union, called on the UK government to “finally get into gear” and ensure that Phillips 66 is not allowed “to just mothball the site and turn it into a glorified storage tank”.
The union previously said using the site as a storage terminal instead of a refinery would “satisfy creditors but would gut jobs, harm the regional economy and compromise the UK’s ability to produce its own fuel”.
Lindsey has been out of operation since the start of August, having been put under the control of the UK’s official receiver — a civil servant — in June 2025 after Prax’s parent company, State Oil Ltd, went into administration.
About 124 of the refinery’s workers were given redundancy notices in September, and the official receiver has said that the jobs of the remaining 250 direct employees would be guaranteed until the end of March this year.
Michael Shanks, a UK energy minister, said Phillips 66 was the “most credible bidder which can provide a viable future for this site”.
Lindsey was bought by the privately owned Prax Group from TotalEnergies in 2012. In a statement last year, the UK government said Lindsey had lost about £75mn since then and the company had been “unable” to answer questions about its finances in the run-up to its collapse.