In view of the government’s upcoming moves, seeking new funds for more selective interventions against high fuel prices, oil companies are stepping in and, in a letter sent to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the Minister of Environment and Energy Security, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, warn of the risk of “further tax levies” on the sector (read tax on excess profits) that “would drain investment capacity and constitute a further disincentive to operate in Europe in a context where large international groups – writes the president of the sector association, Unem, Gianni Murano – are already considering directing new investments to other more competitive areas of the world.”
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The thesis supported by the association that brings together the main Italian companies operating in refining, logistics, distribution of petroleum products, and research and development of new low carbon solutions is as follows: the current criticality of energy markets is not due to “a shortage of crude availability,” but rather “an insufficient level of refining capacity at the European level estimated in several million barrels per day” and is the result, it is emphasized, of an energy policy that in the last decade has prioritized decarbonization goals at the expense of supply security needs “contributing to the progressive closure of refining plants in the Union territory and increasingly binding European demand to the import of finished products.”
In the letter, the association also recalls that Italian refining has paid, like other sectors, the increase in IRAP introduced with decree 21 of February 20 and that industrial prices in the first seven months of the year “net of taxation, were on average lower by 0.03 euros per liter and 0.08 euros per liter for gasoline and diesel compared to the EU average.” The sector, it is explained, “has therefore interpreted the government’s requests for maximum attention to fuel costs and the contribution calculated on the total supplied of gasoline and diesel, in the same period, amounts to about one billion euros less compared to the European average.” Not to mention that refining margins in the European Mediterranean area “have been largely reduced in recent years with an average gross margin from January 2021 to July 2026 of 4.6 dollars per barrel, well below the average operating costs of complex refineries (IEA data of August 12, 2026).”
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The sector, therefore, risks a new twist if it is subject to further levies that will end up shifting investments elsewhere, with the risk of further increasing dependence on imports of refined products and triggering new losses of qualified employment and industrial skills. “Today the sector – explains Unem’s top executive Murano – especially needs a stable and predictable regulatory framework. Investments in industrial conversion require long time horizons and cannot coexist with measures that increase uncertainty or penalize companies’ investment capacity.”
Therefore, it is necessary to continue investing because, Murano reasons further, “refining is cyclical, that is, it goes through periods of negative margins (long) to periods of positive margins (short) and, if one thinks of intervening during positive periods, consequently, as happened after the 2022 European excess profits tax, international operators will invest elsewhere, at a time when investments are needed to transform refineries and support the transition.”
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