Power struggle: The billionaire, the Chinese oil giant and Grangemouth’s forgotten workers

Just five minutes after Martin Hunter found out the Grangemouth oil refinery where he had worked for almost 20 years was closing, it was being reported on BBC news.

The announcement on 12 September 2024 confirmed the site’s imminent closure which ultimately happened in April this year with the loss of hundreds of jobs. Hunter remembers those who weren’t working, but had seen headlines, calling up to ask: “Is this right? Are we losing our jobs?” In the face of global forces, they felt powerless.

These workers had been promised a job for life. But the pressures of the market and the world-wide need for less polluting, greener energy meant it was inevitable that these oil-reliant jobs would have to change.

Grangemouth’s closure had been seen as “a litmus test” of the country’s high profile plan for a “just transition” – a government pledge to move away from fossil fuels without leaving workers and communities behind. But the consensus is that this test has been completely failed.

Hunter grew up in the town of Grangemouth in the shadow of the refinery, expecting that when he left high school he’d join his dad and get a good job at “the BP”, as it’s still locally known even though it was bought by Jim Ratcliffe’s then-relatively scrappy petrochemical company, Ineos, way back in 2005.

Twenty years on, Ratcliffe, who lives between Monaco and Hampshire – as well as owning property in Switzerland and France, and just under 30 per cent of Manchester United – is worth £17bn, making him the seventh richest person in the UK.

In sharp contrast when The Ferret visited Grangemouth, almost six months after it stopped processing crude oil, we found skilled former refinery staff struggling to find new employment, working in less well paid roles, or moving to jobs other refineries abroad.

To 17-year-old Hunter the refinery was “a jumble of pipes, pumps, noise, heat and steam”. By the time he walked out of the door at the end of May aged 36, its landscape of cooling towers, hydrogen columns, hydrocrackers and flares, and the plant’s background mechanical thrum, were to him “a living breathing thing”, and the men and women he worked with on intense 12-hour-shifts were family.

“The refinery was more than just a job,” he says. “It was a journey full of some amazing characters, stories and plot twists.”

But now it was ending.

The writing had been on the wall for a long time. Petroineos, as it had been known since Chinese state oil company PetroChina bought a 50 per cent stake in 2011, first publicly announced future plans to close the refinery and turn it into a terminal for the import of finished fuels in November 2023, claiming it was no longer profitable.

The UK and Scottish governments had already been warned there were problems at the plant and workers, witnessing the decline, had feared its closure was coming.

Standing on the hill above the town to get a better view, a faint chemical tang in the air, Grangemouth plant worker and Unite representative Chris Hamilton points out the scale of the changes to the sprawling industry heartland below us.

Some 434 jobs have already gone from the oil refinery so far, and with hundreds more hanging in the balance the final totals are likely to be much higher. In 2023 a PwC report commissioned by the Scottish government’s business agency, Scottish Enterprise, claimed it supported approximately 2,800 jobs across Scotland.

“Yet when we put a survey out about a month ago 55 per cent had not got work yet,” Hamilton says. He lists workers who’ve had to leave Grangemouth for jobs offshore, down south, or Saudi Arabia. Others have compromised by taking pay cuts.

Most workers got 18-months of redundancy pay, he acknowledges. But the risk for Scotland, he points out, is that these workers will be long gone by the time any new jobs in green industries materialise, taking their skills and training with them.

There is bitterness too about the failure of successive governments to protect refinery staff. Tory ministers rejected the idea of funding an extended licence to keep the site afloat so workers felt buoyed when as the 2024 election approached, Labour politicians took an interest. In a TV debate Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar claimed Labour would save the jobs.

The electoral result in the local constituency was a huge swing from SNP to Labour. “They (Labour) thought they could score cheap political points,” Hamilton grimaces. The union intends to “hold their feet to the fire” and recently released an open letter highlighting that six months after the Labour government announced £200m from its wealth fund to attract new business to Grangemouth, no investors had been secured.

A UK government spokesperson acknowledged the “incredibly difficult time for workers and their families” and claimed that “within weeks” of it coming to power it had “delivered an unprecedented support package”. The union, meanwhile, says it will support ex-workers for as long as it takes.

Ex-refinery operator Martin Hunter, is one of those Hamilton has been supporting. The day before we met in late August he had accepted a job after a three-month search and countless applications. His salary was to drop by about a third, and as the sole earner with four children, that would have had a substantial impact. Two weeks later another job offer had come through. “It’s still less than what I was making but it’s near home,” he says.

It also ends the uncertainty that has taken a toll on his mental health, both in the run-up to redundancy and during the long months of fruitless job hunting. At times, he admits, things were so tough he had suicidal thoughts. It was partly the support of the people he worked with who got him through.

Hunter agrees with Hamilton that politicians have failed the workers. But he feels let down by his employers too. He thinks it’s unjust that the impact on people like him and his colleagues, or on proud communities like Grangemouth with its well maintained parks and annual gala day, didn’t feature in those decisions. “A lot of people came into this place because of these industries,” he says. “But now it’s their home. They deserve to stay here.”

Ineos didn’t respond to The Ferret’s request for comment but they have previously claimed that as “responsible owners” they “continuously engaged with government to ensure the safe operation of the site, and to deliver a smooth transition”. They pointed to investment in new infrastructure and redundancy packages worth over £30m.

Brian Crawford, now 60 and Grangemouth born and bred, worked at the refinery for 24 years and has taken early retirement due to health problems, so he’s staying put in the town. But he worries about the younger workers. “I don’t believe the management gave it a chance,” he says. “I can see jobs are coming in renewables and the like, but when? They should have been in place before Grangemouth closed down so workers could have transferred over.”

For him the rot goes all the way back to the Ineos takeover. “After the strikes in 2013 they more or less took all our benefits off us,” he claims. “The pension, all the free meals, the overtime rate and shift allowance got cut.

“It’s like everything Jim Ratcliffe buys he does the same with, cuts costs wherever he can.”

Some told The Ferret that Jim Ratcliffe had become a hate figure in the refinery. Pictures of him were left for management to see, they claimed, defaced with devil horns or male appendages. “There was a lot of cheering when his football team lost,” said one, who didn’t want to be named, referencing Manchester United, which Ratcliffe bought a stake in in February 2024 and now runs.

Similar cuts have been made at the iconic football club – staff perks like travel and lunches were revoked, legendary former manager Sir Alex Ferguson was asked to step down as ambassador, redundancies saw a quarter of staff lose their jobs while ticket prices were hiked – and came as no surprise to Grangemouth workers.

Multiple sources told The Ferret that relations between Ineos and its partner PetroChina were also under strain. “It was apparent that it was dysfunctional,” said one source close to the Scottish government at the time Petroineos started to signal it was considering closure.

“They wouldn’t even sit in the same room as each other.” Problems, we were told, stemmed from the original 2011 deal which meant PetroChina was meant to stump up most of the investment in the refinery, although both companies shared profits.

Minutes released under freedom of information legislation show that as far back as April 2022 Scottish ministers had been warned by Petro China of problems and were working to persuade them to continue to support the refinery as part of their plans. Yet as late as June 2023 they were being assured that Petro China was “keen to engage with SG as it considers new greener projects at the site including the potential bio refinery and green hydrogen opportunities”.

Other documents reveal difficult relations between UK and Scottish Governments, the latter frustrated by the former’s lack of engagement over energy strategies that were fundamental to Scotland’s economic outlook.

To workers, the fact that the decision to close would likely have been made in boardrooms in China and London – where Ineos is headquartered – made it all the harder to swallow.

“It felt to a lot of guys like: How can China shut down a refinery in Scotland?”, says James Differ, who worked in the control room. He didn’t see the point in getting angry though and dealt with the stress by keeping his head down and picking up the overtime shifts that came rolling in because so many workers started calling in sick towards the end.

In recent weeks he has signed a 12-month contract with a refinery in Saudi Arabia accepting a deal to relocate his whole family – wife, two kids and Tempy the dog. Earnings are tax-free and the package includes free places at the Gulf nation’s British school for his children. His first day is due to be exactly one year on from the closure announcement.

“I can only see benefits,” he says. The obvious ones are financial ones but the conditions will also be better. “I was backfilling shifts all the time,” he recalls. The UK feels like it’s going downhill so badly – police, NHS. That was the biggest thing for me.”

Ewan Gibbs, a historian of energy and labour at Glasgow University and the author of a research paper on Grangemouth from the workers’ perspective, commissioned by the Scottish Government’s advisers on the Just Transition Commission, is not surprised that Scottish energy workers are once again being forced to relocate– just as they did during the deindustrialisation of the 1980s.

The Proclaimers – evoking their 1987 hit Letter from America about economic decline and emigration, with the refrain “Grangemouth no more” – were among those who backed The Alba Party’s campaign to save the refinery from closure.

“People were told this transition would be about a fairer, more prosperous economy as well as a greener one,” says Gibbs. “But that certainly hasn’t been the case here.” Ineos’ Grangemouth complex has long been Scotland’s biggest polluter.

Grangemouth’s failure to manage a just transition sends a message to oil and gas workers across Scotland, Gibbs claims. “It should have been relatively easy to organise a just transition here when compared with the North Sea – it’s much less complex.”

Scotland doesn’t just need to plan better for the future, says Gibbs. It also needs to think about the benefits of a just transition for society and how to make the case for those, addressing fuel poverty and the overseas ownership of key assets.

Satwat Rehman, co-chair of the Just Transition Commission, is sure no-one can disagree with the view this transition has been anything but just. But she also thinks there are clear lessons that can be learned.

Last year The Ferret reported that Scottish Enterprise paid Ineos a £500,000 to assess whether the other petrochemical facilities it owns at the wider Grangemouth complex could be fueled by hydrogen in the future.

“We have been waiting for the market to fix things,” Rehman says. “And we’ve just expected good behaviour from private companies. But there needs to be just transition-related conditionality on any money going to private companies going forward.”

But Gillian Martin, Scottish cabinet secretary for energy, told The Ferret that ministers had always been clear. “The closure of the Grangemouth Refinery by Petroineos was premature and is detrimental to Scotland’s transition to net zero,” she said in a statement. “We have continued to press the UK Government to leave no stone unturned in securing the site’s future as interventions of this magnitude would require action from the UK Government.”

Scottish Enterprise, she insisted, was “doing targeted work in attracting new businesses” to the area and “advancing” projects highlighted by Project Willow, an EY report commissioned by Petroineos and funded by the UK and Scottish Governments to look at green solutions.

Back in Grangemouth though, Chris Hamilton also wants transparency. Workers, he says, understand the need for change. “Nobody wants the world to burn, or wildfires, or other climate catastrophes. But the way we’ve gone about this, making these people redundant – it’s not bringing these communities and workers on board with that messaging.”

He doesn’t mention Reform UK, but with its politicians using climate scepticism as a wedge issue to push for continued oil and gas exploration and the scrapping of net zero targets, the stakes here are high.

The irony, Hamilton argues, is Scotland hasn’t stopped using oil to keep its cars on the roads or to fly off on summer holidays. “Grangemouth could have been part of an opportunity to change that,” he says. ”But so far, it’s not getting its chance.”

All images by Angela Catlin