At least 200,000 liters of oil have leaked from the pipeline of the PCK refinery in Brandenburg, Germany, due to an accident at the Gramzow pipeline station. According to initial investigations, crude oil would have flowed from a small leak for around 2 and a half hours at a pressure of around 20 bar, creating a jet of oil 25 meters high.
Over 100 firefighters immediately rushed to the site, joining the 25 employees of the PCK refinery already present on site: the first information released by the authorities indicates that the leak – equivalent to approximately 1,258 barrels – was caused by preparatory work for a safety test at the plant, scheduled for today 11 December. Immediately after the accident, in fact, rumors began to spread about possible sabotage, a hypothesis subsequently discarded by PCK itself, which ruled out external causes.
The oil spill mainly affected the village of Zehnebeck, about 3 kilometers from the center of Gramzow, with locals urged to keep their doors and windows closed. Furthermore, Uckermark, the area of the region where the accident occurred, is where former German Prime Minister Angela Merkel grew up.
Suction tankers were used to collect the crude oil: at the moment, the clean-up operations are about to be concluded, even if the leak was “largely sealed” around 7.45pm yesterday 10 December, as confirmed by the German press, which cites the Fire Brigade.
From the point of view of environmental impact, the spokesperson of the Ministry of the Environment, Matthias Bruck, spoke of a possible environmental disaster, announcing that “we do not yet know the full extent of the damage, but we suspect that it is very significant”, given that small quantities of crude oil may have ended up in nearby waterways, and then reached the Welse, a tributary of the Oder river.
The pipeline affected by the accident belongs to the PCK refinery – a German subsidiary of the Russian oil group Rosneft – and has been under the protection of the German government since 2022, extending from the port of Rostock, on the Baltic Sea, to Schwedt, in Brandenburg. As reported by ANSA, following the sanctions applied to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the plant stopped sourcing Russian oil, receiving supplies via the port of Rostock and that of Gdansk, in Poland.
