Six hundred jobs at risk as Shell reveals Geelong plant will be sold Six-hundred jobs are at risk in Geelong as the Shell refinery goes up for sale. SHELL will struggle to find a buyer for its Geelong refinery, putting 600 jobs at risk, business analysts and unions say. The oil giant announced tonight it would try to sell the plant by the end of next year. But Australian Workers Union acting state secretary Ben Davis said he was pessimistic about a sale. "This is a refinery, not a milk bar," he said. All the oil companies are consolidating internationally in Asia and the Middle East into mega refineries. The jobs of the plant's 450 workers and 150 contractors now hang in the balance. Any closure is expected to be another blow to Geelong's economy, which has been hit with job cuts at Ford, Alcoa and the Qantas maintenance plant at Avalon in the past 12 months. And in another blow, the jobs of 420 contract workers at the Bandiana army base, near Albury, are also in doubt after the nation's biggest defence company lost a crucial contract to service the army's tanks. Global defence powerhouse BAE Systems is set to sack the workers in July after losing the contract to Australian services company Transfield. Shell will consider converting the refinery, which opened in 1954, to an import terminal if a sale cannot be wrapped up before the end of next year. Mr Davis said workers would get redundancy payouts if the plant closed, but that he was worried about their futures. "They are going to struggle to find these type of jobs again," he said. Shell's downstream vice-president, Andrew Smith, declined to provide details on whether any buyers had expressed interest in the refinery or how many jobs would be lost if it was converted to a terminal to store imported fuel. "Our focus is on negotiating a successful sale of the plant - that's what keeps local jobs," Mr Smith said. He said Shell had not sought additional government support for the refinery and the move was part of a wider strategy to concentrate refining capacity in larger plants. Morningstar energy analyst Peter Warnes said it would be "almost impossible" to find a buyer for the facility, which supplies about half of Victoria's and 30 per cent of South Australia's fuel. He said the plant was built to process light crude oil from Bass Strait oil fields, which were in long-term decline and converting it to process cheaper heavy crude would be uneconomical. He also said the size of the plant, which processes up to 120,000 barrels of oil per day, meant it could not compete against massive Asian refineries, which could process up to 900,000 barrels of oil per day. "I don't think a buyer will come forward," Mr Warnes said. Another analyst at a major investment bank said the Geelong refinery was running at a loss. Shell wrote down its value by $638 million last year. A BAE Systems spokeswoman said it would be forced to cut jobs after its contract for the Bandiana base work ended in July. "Staff changes are part of the normal project life-cycle," she said.