Rasmus Wille

Rasmus Wille, CEO of Statoil Refining Denmark, took up his position a little over three years ago, bringing to the role a companywide refocus on safety and operational excellence. “I’m a Master of Science in chemical engineering and I started my career with Statoil in 1998. I spent five years at the refinery in Denmark doing planning, scheduling, and supply-chain management. I then had about four years in different management positions in the refinery, both within process engineering and supply-chain management.

“I was also, at that time, a part of the management team at the refinery for a short period. Then in 2009–2010, I went to Norway and had a position there as vice president for value-chain management in downstream Statoil. That was basically optimising the supply chain across the two Statoil refineries; that was the main purpose, but there were some other things included there. On 1 January 2011, I came back to Denmark to be the CEO of Statoil Refining Denmark A/S, which is basically our oil-refinery organisation.”

In 1986 Statoil purchased a refinery in Kalundborg from Dansk Esso. Since then, Statoil has modernised and expanded the facility, offering greater refining capability to the Statoil Group and giving the organisation a good stronghold in Denmark. Rasmus had worked at the refinery for more than a decade before taking up his role, so he understood the challenges that lay ahead of him. “I think the greatest challenge is probably that the competition in our downstream business has become even tougher in Europe. We can really see that our competitors are moving and the biggest challenge is for us to move not only at the same pace, but at a faster pace, than our competitors.”

As the Statoil Group has divested its retail business in 2012, the company has established a strong network across Denmark. “As we head up today, we have contracts with our retail network. We have a fixed-supply contract with them so they buy all of their products from our refinery. It’s therefore more on an operational level that we have communication with the downstream. We are mainly in the business here of producing the products in the most efficient way and we’re selling most of our products through fixed-term contracts with downstream businesses present in and around Denmark.”