How Grangemouth oil refinery can still be saved – if SNP and Labour are willing to act
Petroineos’s premature decision to close the Grangemouth refinery in 2025 has starkly laid out government weakness and inaction. Holyrood and Westminster failed to prepare for this scenario by jointly drawing up a credible plan to persuade the company to extend the site’s lifespan.
There are no excuses for this. Attempts by Labour ministers to disingenuously suggest they could do nothing because they only gained power in July won’t cut it. Current Scottish and UK ministers knew for months about the proposed closure before it was confirmed.
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Hide AdThe consequence of this collective political failure is 2,822 direct and indirect jobs on the brink of the scrapheap and an eye-watering £403 million evaporating from the economy. The Grangemouth complex contributes an estimated four per cent of Scotland’s GDP.
The local unemployment rate is about 9.1 per cent compared with 4.6 per cent nationally, with 23.7 per cent of residents economically deprived, compared to 9.3 per cent nationwide.
Still time for rescue plan
Warm words about future renewables projects do nothing for today’s workers. The potential ‘Project Willow’ renewables industries at the complex are years away from being fully operational. The so-called ‘visionary’ government documents talk of what will be delivered at Grangemouth by 2045, a generation away.
The Scottish and UK governments must re-examine all available options. We believe there is still time to save the refinery if there’s the willingness to do so. For Unite, this means government taking a transitional stake in the refinery until we can deliver the greener jobs of the future.
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Hide AdThat stake would not be an open-ended public commitment. It could be temporary until renewable industries at the site are delivered, preventing a massive shock to the Scottish economy and prolonged unemployment for workers.


A time-limited package of measures could assist with ongoing capital expenditure, maintenance works, and the upgrading of assets, including the hydrocracker and hydrogen plants. Government, enterprise bodies, councils and the nascent GB Energy could support these measures.
The refinery is also not the ‘loss-making’ plant the company says it is. In its latest accounts, Petroineos recorded pre-tax profits of £107.5m in 2022. Many of the wider financial issues cited by the company as reasons for closure are not intractable but relate to distorted revaluations of the site’s assets.
Economic earthquake
Politicians have been paying lip service for years to the idea of creating tens of thousands of green jobs, yet they simultaneously say they’ve no power to influence commercial decisions about Grangemouth.
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Hide AdGovernment can no longer stand on the sidelines, using played-out excuses for inaction. The stakes at Grangemouth are too high. We’re already seeing widespread evidence of a jobs crisis in the oil and gas industry developing across Scotland. There’s an economic earthquake stirring which will disproportionately impact the Northeast and Central Belt.
Unite is crystal clear that, if a ‘Just Transition’ is to mean anything, it must be managed in an orderly, organised way by government to avoid the industrial decimation unleashed during the 1980s. We cannot allow oil and gas workers to become this generation’s coal miners.
Unless targeted state support happens, then both governments will be responsible for creating working-class wastelands and allowing mass industrial vandalism on their watch – and they should never be forgiven if this avoidable destruction comes to pass.
Derek Thomson is secretary of Unite Scotland
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