New jobs at refinery as Conoco set to split

Last year, ConocoPhillips announced plans to ‘reposition’ the company’s upstream and downstream businesses into two stand-alone, publicly traded com-panies.

The repositioning of the companies is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2012.

Twenty-six jobs are being created at the ConocoPhillips’s site at South Killingholme, North Lincolnshire.

The new recruits will work in finance and IT and serve 20 locations in six countries.

The Humber refinery has a capacity of 221,000 barrels a day. The South Killingholme site will be part of the new downstream business, known as Phillips 66.

The Humber Refinery is one of the most complex in the UK – it covers 480 acres and employs more than 750 people.

Nina Stobart, a spokesman with ConocoPhillips, described the new jobs as a “really positive move for the Humber”.

In 2011, ConocoPhillips became the first of the so-called ‘super majors’ to shift away from the strategy that led the industry to consolidate into a few players.

The “logic of the split makes sense”, analysts at Houston energy investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co said in a note to investors which was published last year.

There has been growing confidence that global oil prices will remain strong for many years, due to demand from China and India.

Conoco’s 2002 purchase of rival Phillips was among the last of the mega mergers that began in 1998 when BP bought Amoco.