MOTOR OIL HELLAS: Refining and Reshaping a Sustainable Future

Headquartered in Athens with an almost 3,000-strong staff compliment, Motor Oil’s 82 companies span the broadest range of refining, distribution, and many further activities in the wider energy spectrum. Founded in 1970 and refinery operations commencing in Corinth two years later, Motor Oil has now swelled to a group with the might to produce €6 billion in turnover and one possessing more than 1,500 gas stations in Greece, Cyprus, and Southeast Europe.

A leader across the sectors of crude oil refining and marketing of petroleum products in Greece and the greater eastern Mediterranean region, the core of Motor Oil’s business is in the refining, supply, and trading of high-quality petroleum oil products. The company owns and operates one of Greece’s four oil refineries, and it is among Europe’s top and most modern – its rating of 11.54 according to Nelson’s industry-revered index makes it Greece’s most complex refiner.

Motor Oil’s ancillary plants and fuel distribution facilities combine to form the largest privately owned industrial complex in the country, and afford the capacity to process various types of crude oil and manufacture a wide range of oil products.

SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY

While Motor Oil’s state of the art, 186,000 barrels per day Corinth Refineries will continue to serve customers’ needs long into the future, supplying the entire range of refinery products, since 2018 the group has also been actively and increasingly engaged in the supply of electricity and natural gas to final customers, and since 2019 in the electricity production sector via investments in wind and solar energy. 

As Greece joins the rest of the globe in exploring lower-carbon electricity generation, it is clear that investments in renewable energy supply – which are expected to be mainly both onshore and offshore wind, solar, and storage facilities, as well as the increasing penetration of more efficient natural gas-fired generation – will be the key drivers for meeting crucial CO₂ emission reduction targets. “We are an energy group that creates value with consistency and responsibility,” Motor Oil stresses, a commitment borne out in its response to the challenges of sustainable development, building a short, medium, and long- term strategy in the pursuit of a net zero future.

“The energy industry is going through a profound change, driven by carbon reduction targets and consumer preferences,” the company recognises. “The group’s decarbonisation process is moving fast and accelerating as a strategic response to global and local changes in the energy sector and the economy but also due to the pressure from the institutions, investors, society and the market.

“Both the investments in renewable energy sources and the ambitious strategic plan demonstrates the Group’s determination to drive the energy transition and remain a sustainable future-proof energy carrier.”

Motor Oil’s strategy has been developed in accordance with the European Green Deal, the Paris agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with the evolution of its pioneering refinery one of the key pillars underpinning its strategic priorities. “In addition to investing in new and more advanced products, significant refinery projects have been implemented to improve energy efficiency and electricity autonomy,” the company explains.

“Motor Oil is one of the largest industrial units that installs batteries in its facilities to support energy needs, while projects related to digital transformation are implemented at the refinery and other activities of the company.” Nikos Giannakakis, CIO, highlights news of huge significance regarding the group’s renewables portfolio, in the form of the acquisition of a 30% stake in Ellaktor Group, for €182 million.

This is twinned with a framework agreement with Reggeborgh Invest B.V., Ellaktor’s largest shareholder, for 75% of Ellaktor’s RES business consisting of 493MW operating portfolio and 1.6GW pipeline, for the equivalent of €1 billion enterprise value.

DIGITALISATION TRANSFORMATION

In part sparked by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Motor Oil’s digital strategy and digitisation of manufacturing processes have been subject to a concerted acceleration. At the end of 2020 Giannakakis reported that, “in the last two months we’ve seen two years’ worth of acceleration,” as Motor Oil elected to press forth with its investments in technology and the continuation of its digital programme. “Despite the challenging times, we continued investing as we had initially planned,” Giannakakis confirmed. “The pandemic in fact accelerated many of the planned systems changes already in place within our transformation journey.

“At the peak of the crisis we developed a digital planning tool that allows our employees to perform their daily business,” he relayed, speaking of Motor Oil’s resilience and innovation in the face of challenges wrought by the situation; on the manufacturing side, meanwhile, Motor Oil pioneered the concept of a smart factory founded on five key tenets: engineering, production, asset management, workers and optimisation of processes, all are digital throughout.

“Everything to do with the smart factory is classified in those five pillars,” he explained. “With the help of our partner ecosystem working in each of these pillars allowed us to achieve increased production, reduced downtime, reduced production cost, and focus on product optimisation. I think we are going to live in a new reality where our priorities and our digital transformation will be accelerated, but now we’ve added sustainability into the mix too.”

Since its founding in 1970, Motor Oil Group has been best known as an oil and gas manufacturer with the second largest refinery in Europe affording distribution to large industrial and commercial customers. It has transformation deeply embedded within its DNA, and today the group’s profile encompasses much greater diversity to number investments in solar and wind, direct-to-consumer electricity and natural gas solutions and media and trading businesses.

Giannakakis joined Motor Oil Group at the beginning of 2020 as the company’s first CIO and member of the executive management team. In no time at all he has been charged with implementing a strong digital culture, helping to transform the group’s current operations to focus on a better customer experience and promote digitisation in what was a traditional oil and gas business.

“Operating a large and complex refinery representing the majority of the Group’s revenue has obvious priority,” Giannakakis states. “Increasing equipment availability while reducing maintenance cost, minimising business-critical equipment shutdowns and providing performance visibility of refinery equipment to facilitate business decisions are outcomes that have resulted from automated machine learning and augmented analytics.” Giannakakis oversaw the creation of an end-to-end process to elevate customer insights, and support business resilience and customer satisfaction through periods both of stability and volatility.

“Analytics and insights are helping Motor Oil better understand store performance, shopper behaviour, and the impact of Covid-19 on the business through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” Giannakakis expands, of SAP SE’s strategic planning tools which are proving integral to group-level planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation capabilities as well as compliance with financial reporting standards. “We are following SAP’s model to become an intelligent enterprise,” Giannakakis adds, ‘’and the transformation to a leaner, faster, more efficient organisation is succeeding.”

The boundless innovation, creativity and resilience on show at Motor Oil as it forged ahead with advancing the businesses captured the attention of IDG’s CIO – the executive-level IT media brand providing insight into business technology leadership – at the 2021 FutureEdge 50 Awards. “This year’s class of winners are creating a future edge for their organisations through technology,” the brand stated.

As Giannakakis concludes, the benefits of digitalising production and operations and the introduction of intelligent monitoring and control systems speak for themselves. “A culture that is agile and can adapt and thrive in change is a culture of success,” he states, “and change comes through innovation. The overall outcome of these initiatives is enhanced production and the ability to balance shifting supply and demand with pricing and increased energy efficiency, which ultimately supports a resilient and profitable business environment.”