Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
The closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery in April has cast a long shadow over Scotland’s plans for a fair transition away from fossil fuels.
As The Ferret reported this weekend, many of the 400 workers who lost their job at the site feel abandoned.
And with energy set to be a major issue in the run-up to next year’s Holyrood election, the Grangemouth closure is already shaping political arguments over how the Scottish Government is managing the transition.
But why did the refinery close? Did efforts to reduce global warming play a role? Is the UK prioritising refining in other countries over Scotland? And what happens next?
As part of our new series After Oil – which is investigating Scotland’s move to clean energy – Ferret Fact Service looks at four of the key questions around Grangemouth’s closure.
Refining of crude oil began at Grangemouth in 1924, and the site produced fuels like petrol, diesel and jet fuel. It was the only refinery in Scotland.
The refinery was owned by Petroineos, a joint venture between Jim Ratcliffe’s petrochemical company, Ineos, and the Chinese state-owned oil company, PetroChina.
Petroineos announced in 2023 it was converting the site into a terminal for the import of finished fuels from abroad, and refining operations stopped on 29 April 2025.
The company blamed multiple factors for the decision but particularly what it said were significant financial losses since 2011.
In the refinery business’s most recent accounts for 2023, which were not published until July 2025, the company claims it made an operating loss of £224m that year.
According to Petroineos, a key cause of this was the outage of a piece of equipment called the hydrocracker. It helped break down heavier oil to produce some of the most profitable products made at the refinery, such as diesel.
It was taken offline for planned maintenance in April 2023, but the company says attempts to restart it failed, and it was never fully operational again in the two years leading up to the refinery closure.
Karin Goodwin
The outage had a “material adverse effect” on the performance of the business, Petroineos said, adding that the move to a fuel import terminal was a response to “ongoing asset reliability challenges” at the site.
Unite, which represents many of the workers at the refinery, has rejected the claim that the site consistently made heavy losses. It has argued that losses over the last decade were exaggerated by one-off accounting decisions, such as a decision to mark down the value of the refinery’s assets by £344m in 2020 which “distorts the overall picture”.
The union argued that when the hydrocracker was working, the refinery could be profitable. Unite suggested that management at the site chose not take steps required to restart the equipment, including additional investment, because moving to a fuel import model was cheaper and more lucrative for Petroineos.
The refinery’s closure does not mean the whole Grangemouth complex is shutting down. Other Ineos facilities, including petrochemical and plastics plants, are still operating. There are fears these could also be at risk in future
Petroineos has said the closure reflected both short-term technical failures and long-term market changes – including falling demand for polluting fuels like petrol and diesel amid climate policies and as electric vehicles take off.
The refinery was also one of Scotland’s most climate polluting sites – producing 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 in an average year, over three per cent of Scotland’s total emissions. This means it was always likely it would have to either close or transition to greener production methods for Scotland to meet its target of being net zero by 2045.
Petroineos described the move to fuel imports as a necessary step “as the energy transition gathers pace”, citing the UK’s upcoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars.
Some politicians have claimed this showed net zero directly caused the closure. Nigel Farage said climate policy was “destroying vital national assets” like Grangemouth, while his deputy Richard Tice suggested scrapping net zero would allow the refinery to reopen.
Paul Dobson
But an expert energy consultancy has said the hydrocracker failure was a turning point at the site which hurt its future viability.
An analysis by Wood Mackenzie of the risk of closure of the Grangemouth site at the start of 2023, before the hydrocracker issue, did not foresee “a high risk of closure in the short term”.
The equipment failure, allied to declining profit margins in refining, may have put Petroineos off further investment to the site to keep it open, a Wood Mackenzie analyst argued in 2023.
Other analysts have pointed out that UK and European refineries have been closing for years due to tough market conditions, partly caused by pressure from climate policies but also under investment and competition from larger facilities in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Some refineries on the continent, however, have been repurposed rather than shut – suggesting that alternatives to closure do exist.
It is seen as unlikely that Grangemouth will reopen if Reform wins power and scraps net zero policies. The next UK election is not scheduled to be until 2029, and Ineos has already announced it is decommissioning key pieces of refinery infrastructure.
Some online discussion has also linked the closure of Grangemouth to falling North Sea oil production or government restrictions on offshore drilling. However, by the time it closed, Grangemouth was importing most of the oil it refined and was not reliant on UK or Scottish oil.
As well as the debate over climate policy, the refinery closure has also featured in discussions over Scotland’s constitutional future.
In particular some supporters of Scottish independence and politicians have questioned why the UK Government backed an Ineos project in Belgium while not offering direct investment at Grangemouth.
In 2023, the UK’s export credit agency, UK Export Finance (UKEF), agreed to provide a loan guarantee of around £600m for a new Ineos chemicals plant – “Project ONE” – in Antwerp.
A loan guarantee means the government promises to repay a bank loan if the company cannot. This effectively acts as a form of insurance and allows companies to access bigger loans at lower cost.
No money has actually been paid to Ineos – it would only be paid if the company defaults on its borrowing in future.
UKEF’s role is to support British-based exporters, and its aim in this case was to help UK companies win contracts to supply equipment and services for the Belgian plant. One of those suppliers could be Wood Group, an engineering firm based in Aberdeen – suggesting that the project may still offer some economic benefit to Scotland, even though it is based overseas.
Unlike Grangemouth, Project ONE is not a refinery, but a chemical facility – designed to produce ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics. There is no evidence that the building of Project ONE influenced the decision to close Grangemouth.
Both the Scottish and UK Governments have been accused of doing too little to support workers at Grangemouth.
While each has pledged funding for a long-term transition at the site, unions and local politicians have expressed anger that this money has not helped workers. As The Ferret reported this weekend, many former refinery workers are still out of work months after the closure, and some have been forced to take lower-paid roles or relocate to the Middle East.
Labour has faced particular criticism because Scottish leader Anas Sarwar promised in the lead up to the 2024 general election that the party would “step in to save the jobs at the refinery”.
In February 2025, the prime minister announced that Grangemouth would benefit from £200m of funding from the UK Government’s new National Wealth Fund.
Unite has expressed frustration that none of this investment has yet been delivered.
This money was never intended to be direct investment to keep the refinery site open. Instead it is on the table to attract private sector investment to develop new industrial activity that could replace the refinery.
Petroineos, with funding from the Scottish and UK Governments, commissioned a study called Project Willow to look at the future options for Grangemouth.
Led by consultancy firm EY, Project Willow outlined a range of possible industries that could replace oil refining at the site including plastics recycling and the production of sustainable aviation fuels.
The Scottish Government has also pledged £25m to proposals that came from Project Willow.
However, these options would likely not materialise for a number of years and could require potentially billions of pounds in private sector investment.
In the meantime there are concerns that skilled workers could either drop out of the work force or move abroad, meaning the skills are not there to deliver the new proposals if they eventually come online.
Main image: Angela Catlin
Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
Footage of farmed trout suffocating, haemorrhaging, and being beaten with batons in a slaughterhouse has prompted an official complaint to a government regulator.
