The Grangemouth refinery, Scotland’s only crude processing facility, is set to close in the second quarter of 2025, its owners confirmed on Thursday, as the refinery has been struggling to compete with the new complex facilities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The Grangemouth refinery, which was opened by the predecessor of BP in 1924, expanded its production into petrochemicals in the 1950s.
However, the facility with a refining capacity of 150,000 barrels per day (bpd) has been unable to compete with the massive new refineries that major oil firms and refiners have built in Asia and the Middle East in recent years.
The refinery’s owner Petroineos, a joint venture between PetroChina and INEOS, on Thursday announced its intention to cease refinery operations at Grangemouth and transition the site to a finished fuels import terminal and distribution hub during the second quarter of 2025, subject to consultation with employees.
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But “The INEOS businesses at Grangemouth, namely INEOS O&P UK and INEOS FPS (Forties Pipeline System), will continue as normal delivering high-quality services and products to our customers and are largely unaffected by this change,” INEOS said today.
The closure of the refinery will result in 400 job losses as the number of employees at the site will be cut to 75 from 475.
The conversion of the site to a fuel import terminal would “safeguard fuel supply for Scotland” but this terminal would need fewer than 100 employees, according to the company.
Some major oil firms, including Shell and Eni, have recently announced they would convert refineries in Europe to meet demand for base oil and biofuels.
In January 2024, Italy’s Eni said it would convert its refinery in Livorno into a biofuels-making facility in a second announcement of an upcoming closure of a European oil refinery in less than a week.
Eni’s announcement came days after Shell said that it plans to convert its oil refinery at the Wesseling site in Germany into a production unit for base oils.
