Shell has installed an industrial-scale electric tubular heater at the R3 base oil project at its Energy and Chemicals Park Rheinland in Germany, replacing a conventional fired-heating duty with electrical process heat. Project partners Shell, Schneider Electric, and Axens describe it as the first installation of its kind at industrial scale in Europe.
The heater uses Axens’ Heurtey Petrochem Solutions Electric Tubular Radiant Heater technology and has been integrated with a modular electrical package supplied by Schneider Electric. That package includes distribution switchgear, transformers, and a power-control system interfacing with Axens’ process controls and Shell’s existing site infrastructure.
The installation is designed to provide the high-temperature duty required for base-oil distillation without combustion at the heater itself. Axens says the equipment can therefore operate without direct carbon dioxide or nitrogen oxide emissions, although the wider carbon performance still depends on the electricity supplying it and the other processes operating across the site.
Electrical conversion at this scale changes more than the heat source. A fired heater receives fuel through the process plant’s gas system and combines combustion, heat transfer, and control in one established equipment package. An electric installation transfers a substantial part of that duty into the site’s electrical network, bringing transformers, switchgear, protection, power quality, and control response much closer to the process-engineering problem.
Schneider Electric’s system is designed to modulate power quickly while Axens’ process control manages the corresponding heat duty. The partners say the arrangement has been engineered around Shell’s requirements for operability and power quality, reflecting the degree to which large-scale industrial electrification now depends on process and electrical systems being designed together rather than treated as separate utilities.
The heater forms part of a wider conversion at Wesseling, where Shell is turning the former hydrocracker operation into a highly electrified Group III base-oils plant. The completed facility is expected to produce around 300,000 tonnes a year, equivalent to approximately 40% of German demand and 9% of current European Union demand for base oils.
Group III products are high-viscosity-index base oils used in premium lubricants including engine and transmission oils, as well as fluids used in electric vehicles. Shell expects the plant to be Germany’s largest base-oils facility and one of the ten largest in Europe when the Wesseling transformation is completed at the end of 2028.
The broader site project carries a substantially larger emissions claim than the heater itself. Shell expects the high degree of electrification, combined with the end of crude-oil processing at Wesseling, to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by around 620,000 tonnes a year. That figure applies to the overall transformation and should not be attributed solely to the newly installed electric heater.
Rheinland is absorbing other large electrical loads at the same time. Shell is constructing the 100MW REFHYNE II proton-exchange-membrane electrolyser at the park, with start-up scheduled for 2027 and hydrogen output of up to 44 tonnes a day, subject to renewable-power availability. The existing REFHYNE I electrolyser provides another 10MW of capacity.
Those developments illustrate the infrastructure consequence of replacing process fuels with electricity. Electrification can remove combustion from an individual plant duty, but the equivalent energy still has to arrive through grid connections, transformers, internal distribution, protection systems, and control equipment capable of operating continuously in an industrial environment.
Reliability is particularly important in refinery and chemical operations because a loss of process heat can interrupt production or require a controlled shutdown. The technical case for electric heating therefore depends on more than heater efficiency: availability of electrical supply, maintainability, power-system resilience, process response, and integration with existing equipment all affect whether the system can replace a fired unit without introducing another operational constraint.
Shell is training operators on simulators before the wider base-oils plant starts production, while thousands of pipework connections across the Wesseling site are being reconfigured around the new units. The electric heater is therefore an installed component within a much larger commissioning programme rather than a standalone demonstration.
Its useful evidence will emerge once the base-oils plant is operating continuously. If the equipment delivers stable heat input and acceptable electrical performance under normal refinery conditions, Rheinland will provide process operators with a full-scale reference for a class of industrial heat duty still dominated by combustion. The hardware is now installed; sustained operation will determine how readily the approach travels to other plants.
