Drone attacks in Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are exposing a critical weakness in fossil fuel energy systems: their centralization makes them easy targets.
Ukraine has hit 16 of Russia’s 38 oil refineries since early August, ultimately disrupting over a million barrels a day of refining capacity, tightening domestic supplies, and pushing diesel exports to their lowest level since 2020, The Financial Times reports.
The attacks on Russian oil infrastructure seem to be the most effective campaign Ukraine has carried out so far, said Benedict George, head of European petroleum products pricing at Argus.
The vulnerability of fossil fuel energy systems in modern warfare stems from their size and centralization, with large-scale facilities collecting and distributing fuel to many users. A single attack on one facility has a widespread impact, even when waged by a small flying machine, like a drone.
“The general lesson to be drawn from this, it seems to me, is that centralized and complex energy facilities are now sitting ducks for drone attack, and that that will certainly alter military calculations going forward,” writes climate author activist Bill McKibben in his The Crucial Years newsletter.
The drone attacks are especially effective against refineries, which are “highly complex and much harder to repair than simple crude oil facilities like export pipelines, ports, and hubs,” Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at the Nordic financial services group Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB, writes in a recent report.
“It can take months and months to repair complex refineries,” Schieldrop explains. “It is thus mainly Russian oil products which will be hurt by this. First oil product exports will go down, thereafter Russia will have to ration oil product consumption domestically.”
Russia previously used similar tactics against Ukraine. It launched a series of persistent attacks on Ukrainian oil and gas facilities, prompting Ukraine’s largest energy firm to seek European Union investment to boost energy security with new green infrastructure. In the winter of 2024, Russian attacks threatened to rob Ukraine of fuel for heating ahead of the cold winter.
This past January, Danish wind developer Vestas A/S and Ukraine’s DTEK Renewables announced they would add nearly 400 megawatts of new wind capacity in Ukraine to help secure the grid. “The resilience of wind farms shone through, with the fact that it takes 100 times more missiles to destroy a wind farm compared to a single gas plant, showcasing their durability and importance in challenging environments,” Corporate Knights Director of Research Ralph Torrie wrote on LinkedIn at the time.
Similar attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities, like the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, present a threat of nuclear meltdown that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently said has become “critical,” the Globe and Mail writes.
The vulnerability of both Ukrainian and Russian energy systems can be alleviated by switching to renewable sources, McKibben says. “Solar farms and wind turbines are scattered, which makes them harder to hit, and relatively simple to fix,” he writes.