ULSAN ― Many might assume that the product Korea exports most would be smartphones or cars, thanks to leading global brands such as Samsung and Hyundai. But the nation’s best selling export item this year is oil products like gasoline and diesel.

When it comes to exports by product for the first nine months of this year, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said oil products topped the list, overtaking semiconductor goods. Exports of oil products reached $41.5 billion between January and September, higher than $36.8 billion in exports of semiconductor chips.

How could this happen in the world’s fifth-largest oil-importing country? A visit to the Ulsan Complex of SK Innovation, the nation’s top oil refinery, provided the clue to the answer. 

First visitors to the complex are overwhelmed by its size. The nation’s largest petrochemical site extends to an area of land that 8.2 square kilometers. The company refines 800,000 barrels per day. Looking down from the observatory, the site is next to the sea and filled with dozens of facilities built with a number of pipelines and circular oil storages.

Three advanced oil refining units that convert crude oil to valuable oil products like gasoline and diesel help the refiner to become the nation’s top oil product exporter.

The huge investment this kind of facility requires means that not many countries have them. For instance, SK Innovation invested $1.8 billion to open its second fluid catalytic cracking unit on 400,000 square meters of land in 2008. The second FCC boasts of efficiency in its operations by adopting atomization process. “Only 24 people work in a control room to run the unit. We work based on three time shifts a day to run the unit for 24 hours,” Lee Choon-gil from SK Energy, the oil refinery arm of SK Innovation, said.

Another key facility to enable the refiner to export oil products is eight docks adjacent to the complex.

“Along the coastline adjacent the site, there are eight docks for oil tankers to import crude oil and to export oil products,” Vivienne Lee from SK Energy said.

She said the company is able to ship out 300,000 barrels of oil through those eight docks per day, which is 15 percent of the nation’s daily oil consumption.

Armed with competitive facilities in the Ulsan Complex, SK Innovation’s oil exports increased for the past five years.

The company exports 60 percent of the oil it refines. In 2011, SK Innovation exported 172 million barrels of oil products. The company is expected to break its annual export record by the end of this year as its oil exports reached 88 million barrels in the first half of this year.

By Seo Jee-yeon (jyseo@heraldcorp.com)