(Bloomberg) -- Europe’s largest oil refinery suffered a malfunction, a potential source of jitters for the continent’s refined fuels market where supply has already been hit by industrial action.

The compressor of fluid catalytic cracker unit 2 tripped on Oct. 12 due to the loss of power supply, according to a fire safety alert from the region’s Rjinmond Veilig service. Known as FCC units, the conversion plants are typically used to make refined products such as gasoline.

Shell Plc’s Pernis plant near Rotterdam has been flaring elevated amounts of gas following the incident, triggering 200 complaints from the public, DCMR, an environmental regulator, said in a notice on its website. The plant is also an important source of diesel within Europe.

The continent can ill afford material disruption to refined petroleum supply, given a European Union ban on purchases from Russia that’s due to start in early February. Strikes over pay in France have knocked out a swath of the nation’s fuelmaking, crunching supply.

BP Plc is carrying out planned work on the FCC at its Rotterdam refinery, which is next to Pernis in Europe in terms of size.

Shell said in a statement that governments have been informed about the incident, but didn’t elaborate on what processing capacity was affected or what it would mean for fuel supply.

“I can only tell you that we expect the nuisance will continue for the time being and that try to minimize the nuisance for the people in the vicinity,” a Shell spokesman said.

(Updates with more details on malfunction in second paragraph, number of complaints in third.)

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