Technology hands-on - a whole night long. On 8 June 2018, more than 1,000 visitors were travelling around various technology centres in the Rhein-Erft district. Shell’s Rhineland Refinery was one of them - for the avowed purpose of giving people an inside view into the complex world of Germany’s largest refinery. Here are some of the things people were able to see behind the scenes in the Wesseling section of the plant: up to midnight, the groups of visitors who were interested were offered tours of the plant, tours of discovery through the educational centre, exhibitions on various subjects, an insight into the sequence of operations in a control station, to name only a few things. People enjoyed the event enormously. And we were in the middle of all this.

In the run-up to the Night of Technology, accompanied by our specialist for architectural photography, Christoph Seelbach, we paid a visit to a Shell tank area. This was quite an exceptional experience for all of us and the photos that were made speak for themselves. We were all agreed on this point: technology and large-scale plants have aesthetics that are totally unique.