Liam Denning, Columnist

Even Old Oil Refiners Get This Disruption Thing

It's partly an attempt to cash in on big changes in the oil market.

April 30, 2018 at 4:47 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Oil storage tanks stand at the Valero Energy Corp. St. Charles Refinery at night in Norco, Louisiana, U.S., on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018. U.S. refiners exported staggering amounts of diesel and gasoline last year, hitting records in both categories while continuing to eye more opportunities to expand.Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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For all its painful ubiquity, “disruption” is not a word usually thrown around when discussing oil refining. The business of taking toxic raw materials and turning them into useful fuels inside a mess of pipes and tanks is as old-school as it gets.

Even so, Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s $36 billion acquisition of Andeavor, sprung Monday morning, is at least partly an attempt to capitalize on, and get ahead of, some big disruptions both happening now and about to hit the oil market.