Well now. Oil refineries tend to be made out of thick steel pipework and vessels, to contain unpleasant chemicals at high temperatures, and they're designed with blast panels and pressure release systems as they're somewhat likely to go boom without external assistance. But the whole site isn't like that

The control room tends to be just a plain old brick building somewhat removed from the main site - you don't want to incinerate your ops team if there's a fire.

The Motor Control Centres (MCCs) tend to get warm due to all the switchgear that they contain, which means they're kept aside, generally in quite thin-walled structures.

Hit either of those, the plant is going to be down for a long time.

If you're looking to render the refinery unusable, you either need enough boom to wreck inch-thick steel to the extent you can't just weld it up again, or enough precision to hit something irreplaceable.

[–] JillyB@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago

or enough precision to hit something irreplaceable.

Haven't they been doing that? I can't remember where I heard it. But I heard they were mostly targeting storage tanks until they talked to a petrochemical engineer. They told Ukraine that there's some critical bit that Russia can't manufacture and they've been targeting those as much as possible since.