ExxonMobil’s decision to close its Fife Ethylene Plant at Mossmorran in Scotland, risking over 400 jobs, follows a depressingly similar pattern to the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery less than a year ago. Again, multinational owners have decided to walk away from ageing infrastructure rather than invest in modernisation, leaving UK workers to pay the price.
Why is this happening and who is to blame?
It may come as no surprise that ExxonMobil, the company famous for funding climate change denial, has sought to blame the UK’s ‘policy environment’ for this decision. But the Mossmorran plant was first built in the 1980s and is now far less efficient and less profitable than modern equivalents in China and the Middle East. This, coupled with the invasion of Ukraine and the peak in European prices for gas – which the plant uses as a feedstock as well as for energy – made this decision somewhat inevitable. Irrespective of any policy to respond to the climate crisis, it is no longer economically rational to produce ethylene with ancient infrastructure in the UK.
But that doesn’t mean the resulting loss of livelihoods and chemical production was inevitable. Could ExxonMobil have done more to protect its workforce and what should its responsibility be? It’s certainly not a company short of cash. In 2024, it made a global profit of £26 billion, whilst the UK arm of the company paid £150 million in dividends to its shareholders. The Mossmorran plant pumped 700,000 tons of CO2e into the atmosphere in the same year. Yes, it paid for some of this through the Emissions Trading Scheme (around £16 million), but it also received free allocations amounting to about 40 per cent of these emissions.
What is government’s role?
As with Grangemouth, the UK and Scottish governments and their predecessors could have foreseen this and done something about it far earlier. These stories of industrial decline have underscored the risk of leaving fossil fuel companies to protect workers and manage a successful transition to more modern, competitive industries.
There has been a total failure by governments to come up with a strategy to futureproof against this inevitability, provide good jobs into the future and support communities to thrive. An obvious solution would be for the UK government to stimulate market demand for cleaner, greener alternatives, enabling companies to invest in fossil free chemicals production in the UK. That is the only route to a thriving and futureproofed chemical industry that can outcompete dirtier supply chains abroad. As ethylene is both carbon intensive to produce, and the foundation on which whole swathes of chemicals are built, greening its production would have a very significant impact.
What should happen now?
The planned closure at Mossmorran leaves just one remaining ethylene plant in the UK. Ironically, that is located at Grangemouth and operated by INEOS, another company with a poor history of transition planning and investment. Like ExxonMobil, INEOS has blamed climate policy for the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery. Both companies stand to benefit if climate policy fails in Europe and is not replicated in Asia and the Middle East.
Against this backdrop, it is crucial for the UK and Scottish governments to look at the extensive infrastructure that is left at Mossmorran and Grangemouth, and quickly identify new resilient industries that will retain jobs and supply the low carbon products of the future.
Photo by Richard Webb
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