A 2026 Status Report — October 17, 2026

World oil production rose 17% between 2012 and 2025, from 86.2 to a record 100.6 million barrels per day, while the number of refineries stayed roughly flat. More than a decade into the push to decarbonize, the world is processing more oil through about the same number of plants, not less.

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have damaged dozens of refineries in 2025 and 2026. Almost none have closed for good. Most were repaired and restarted, so war shows up as lost output and higher prices, not as a smaller refinery count.

The numbers pass the 70% sanity check. A rule of thumb from refinery operators is that a running refinery cannot turn down much below about 70% of its capacity. Worldwide, refineries actually processed about 80% of their capacity in most years, and even the 2020 pandemic only pushed that to 74%, just above the floor.

Production sits much closer to refinery capacity (about 97% in 2025), but that comparison is misleading. Production includes roughly 13 million b/d of natural gas liquids, such as propane and ethane, most of which go to petrochemical plants and heating fuel without passing through a refinery. Refinery runs are the right figure to compare with capacity.

The 70% rule applies to individual plants, so the global average is only a rough check: some refineries run near 95% while others sit idle for repairs. Capacity figures for 2013– 2022 and run figures before 2024 are approximate values from Energy Institute tables.

The refinery counts are shown only at the two ends because no agency publishes a yearly global tally.

How many refineries are there?

The best current estimate is about 650 to 700 operating refineries, with total capacity near 104 million barrels per day. An industry compilation of IEA, EIA, OPEC and Oil & Gas Journal data puts the 2025 figure at 650+ refineries and 103.3 million b/d. Brazil’s ANP, citing the Energy Institute, puts 2025 capacity at 103.8 million b/d, down 0.3% on 2024.

You will also see figures of 750 to 825. The difference is definition, not growth. Broader databases count small topping plants, asphalt plants and China’s independent “teapot” refineries, which the standard surveys leave out or group together.

On either basis, the count in 2025 is close to where it was in 2012. What changed is size and location. Older, smaller plants in the US, Europe and Japan closed; fewer but much larger plants opened in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The US alone has 131 active refineries, down from a peak of 254 in 1982.

Refineries hit by war

Dozens of refineries have been struck since 2025, but the confirmed permanent closures from war damage are close to zero. Damaged units are repaired and restarted, often repeatedly.

Russia. By late June 2026, CNN counted more than 300 Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities since 2022, most of them from mid-2024 on. According to the IEA, some of Russia’s 32 refineries have been hit up to 15 times, and Ukraine’s defense ministry claimed in October 2026 that 51% of Russian capacity was disabled. That figure is Kyiv’s own and is not independently verified. Strikes resumed on October 15 when drones hit the Ryazan refinery after a three-day pause.

Middle East. Since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28, 2026, Iranian missiles and drones have hit refineries across the Gulf. Consultancy IIR estimated nearly 1.9 million b/d of Gulf refining capacity was shut in the war’s second week. A July review found that more than half of the region’s 73 active refineries had been struck, and that Kuwait’s Mina Abdullah plant remained shut for repairs. Inside Iran, US and Israeli strikes hit the Tehran refinery and several fuel depots in March. Iran’s oil minister said in September that much of the damaged capacity had been rebuilt.

The net effect on the count is small. The effect on supply is large: at any given moment in 2026, a meaningful share of Russian and Gulf capacity has been offline.

New refineries versus closures

From 2024 to 2026, a handful of very large refineries opened and a similar number of older ones closed. The plant count is roughly a wash; capacity is flat to slightly up.

Kpler expected 765,000 b/d of crude capacity to shut in 2025. BloombergNEF reported that global capacity shrink in 2025 for the first time since 2021, then forecast net growth of 708,000 b/d in 2026. That forecast predates the Iran war. The Grangemouth and Benicia capacities are approximate.

What this means for decarbonization

By the numbers, decarbonization has not yet reduced global oil use. The Energy Institute’s 2026 Statistical Review reports oil consumption up 1.3% in 2025 to 103 million b/d, and energy-sector CO2 emissions up 1.1% to a record 35.8 billion tonnes. Oil production has risen in every year since 2012 except the 2020 pandemic dip.

The refinery closures in Europe and the US are mainly about economics: weak margins, aging plants and competition from new Asian and Middle Eastern mega-refineries. Some owners cite expected demand decline, but so far that capacity has moved, not disappeared.

The two readings people draw from this differ:

• Transition advocates point to electric vehicles flattening gasoline demand in China and Europe, and argue the 2026 supply shocks will speed the shift. The Energy Institute itself likened the moment to the 1970s oil shocks, which cut oil use for years.

• Skeptics point out that each year of record production makes net-zero-by-2050 targets harder, and that wartime fuel shortages have pushed governments to prioritize energy security over emissions.

The plain fact is that the world’s refining system is about as large as it was in 2012 and is running more oil than ever. Whether 2025 marks a peak will depend on how demand responds to the 2026 price shock.

Sources and caveats

Production figures are the Energy Institute’s crude oil plus natural gas liquids series, via YCharts. No agency publishes an annual global refinery count, so the 2012 counts in the chart are approximate estimates and the 2025 counts reflect current industry compilations. War-damage figures change weekly; this report reflects reporting through October 17, 2026.

• Energy Institute Statistical Review 2026 summary (DieselNet)
• Global Oil Refinery Industry statistics (BusinesStats)
• ANP Statistical Yearbook 2026, Section 1
• 2025–2026 Russian fuel crisis (Wikipedia)
• AP via PBS: Ukraine claims half of Russian refining disabled
• OilPrice: Ukraine strikes Ryazan refinery
• Reuters via PGJ: 1.9 million b/d of Gulf capacity shut
• Polymerupdate: Iranian attacks hit over half of Middle East refineries
• Al Jazeera: Iran oil facilities hit
• Bernama: Iran says refining capacity rebuilt
• Kpler Refinery Monthly Report, May 2025
• Statbase: global refining capacity 2025 (Energy Institute data)
• BloombergNEF Global Oil Refinery Quarterly
• Statista: US refinery count
• EIA Outlook on global refining to 2028
• IEA global refinery runs estimates

This report was researched and drafted by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, at the request and under the direction of the author for TellRex.com. The author chose the topic and scope and reviewed the final text.

Addendum B to Part 1 and Part 2

Net zero is not enough. What would it take to save the ice, and the lives that depend on it?

Four short briefings, prepared with Claude, follow one climate model from today to 2100.

Part 1, The Road to Net Zero: a realistic transition reaches net zero around 2074. Warming peaks near 2.1 °C and stays there. Net zero stops the warming from rising, but it does not bring temperatures down.

Part 2, Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal: pulling CO₂ back out of the air on an enormous scale could cool the planet to about 0.8 °C by 2100. It would mean removing roughly twice today’s total emissions every year.

Addendum A, Climate-Related Deaths: heat from human-caused warming already kills about 350,000 people a year. About 15 million more will die before 2050 whatever we do now. By 2100 the toll reaches about 66 million on the realistic path, or 37 million with large-scale carbon removal.

Addendum B, Cooling to Save the Ice, and Lives

• What the ice needs: the Arctic and Greenland need a climate near that of the 1980s, about 0.6 °C above pre-industrial. That is roughly 0.8 °C cooler than today.
• Lives saved: deliberately cooling the planet could save about 40 to 46 million lives this century.
• The catch: it must never stop suddenly. A sudden halt in 2070 would bring back 0.9 °C of warming in six years and cost some 19 million lives. With carbon removal underneath, the same halt is far less dangerous.

All of these figures are conservative. They count only deaths from heat and leave out tipping points.

So the question is no longer what it would cost. It is what risks the people alive today are willing to take, and what commitment they will make, to spare future generations a loss they could never undo.

Download the complete PDF Addendum

Addendum A to Part 1 and Part 2

Climate-related death tolls associated with the previous “briefing” posts—Part 1 of 2 (The Road to Net Zero) and Part 2 of 2 (Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal)—is a 6-page PDF laid out like the two “briefings.” It re-draws earlier CO₂ chart created by Claude following my instructions, with the “briefing” scenarios and adds a single climate-deaths graph.

To keep everything in sync, Claude rebuilt the same kind of carbon-cycle and climate model the “briefings” use. It reproduces their key figures closely: CO₂ peaking around 483 ppm on the realistic path and 463 ppm with carbon removal, and warming peaking around 2.1 °C and 1.9 °C. Claude then ran the “net zero by 2050” path through it as a fourth scenario.

Deaths are tied to each path’s warming. The low end of the range is matched to Bressler (2021) and the high end to Carleton et al. (2022), and the result checks out against the Lancet Countdown’s figure for today’s heat deaths.

What the deaths graph shows:

• Today: about 350,000 deaths a year (range 220,000–575,000), counting deaths from heat and temperature only.
• 2026 to 2050: about 15 million deaths on every path. Warming lags emissions, so the next 25 years are largely locked in.
• Total by 2100:

• The key message: net zero stops the annual rate of death from rising but not the dying—millions of people continue to die. Deaths level off at roughly 0.75–1 million a year and stay there. Only cooling brings them back down.

These scenarios sit at the low end of the risk. They leave out climate tipping points, such as ice-sheet collapse, permafrost thaw and a shutdown of the Atlantic ocean circulation, because their timing is still debated. That uncertainty is not a reason to wait. It is a warning that argues for speed and early action rather than further delay.

Chart A-1

Chart A-2

Download complete PDF Addendum

Part 2 of 2

Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 1 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::

Two climate briefings, in plain English

These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.

1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.

2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.

Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:

• Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
• The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
• The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.

Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.

The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.

With best regards,
Doug Grandt

Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended:

I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal riefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.

Chart 1

Chart 2

Chart 3

Chart 4

Chart 5

Download the complete PDF

Part 1 of 2

Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 2 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::

Two climate briefings, in plain English

These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.

1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.

2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.

Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:

• Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
• The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
• The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.

Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.

The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.

With best regards,
Doug Grandt

Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended: “

I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal briefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.

Chart 1

Chart 2

Chart 3

Chart 4

Chart 5

Download complete PDF

Download the PDFs