Scotland’s Unjust Transition: The View from Grangemouth

The closure of the Grangemouth Oil Refinery in 2025 represents a test of Scotland’s ‘just transition’. While oil and gas jobs are disappearing, renewables have yet to deliver on jobs and investment – and a failure to get the energy transition right risks fuelling far-right resentment. 

‘We had jobs that were viewed as generational jobs and now they’re gone’. This glib summary, delivered in a video published by the Scottish Trades Union Congress in December 2025, was how one worker affected by the closure of Grangemouth oil refinery explained living through two years of industrial crisis. Chris Hamilton, the refinery convener, added that the closure had been ‘life changing’ for him and his colleagues. Hamilton underlined the sustained impact of job losses, uncertainty, and being thrust into a struggle to salvage what he could for himself, his workmates, and the local community.¹ Two years prior, in November 2023, Petroineos announced it intended to close the refinery, citing its financial performance and the cost of investment required to modernise production at the plant. Closure eventually followed on 29 April 2025. More than a century of refining on the banks of the Firth of Forth came to an end without fanfare. The refinery has been replaced by an import terminal, meaning Grangemouth remains locked into the throes of the carbon economy but that Scotland imports rather than refines petroleum products. Workers were informed of the cumulation of the closure process afterwards, via email.²

Since the refinery closure, a further slew of major job losses have been announced in Scotland’s beleaguered oil and gas sector. In October 2025, the oil services firm Petrofac filed for administration, endangering up to 2000 jobs in Scotland.³ In December, another 100 offshore redundancies were announced by one of the leading North Sea producers, Harbour Energy.⁴ The regional effects of the Grangemouth job losses were reinforced on the opposite side of the Forth when Exxon announced it intended to close down its ethylene plant at the Mossmorran petrochemicals complex in West Fife.⁵ Job losses have been politicised by oil and gas employers, as well as by Reform, Tory, and SNP politicians, who are keen to blame the British government and the operation of an Energy Profits Levy – which originated under the Tories in the period of escalating oil prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A longer-term picture predicts that employment in offshore oil and gas and the supply chain could fall by more than half between 2024 and 2030, from 115,000 to 57,000 and then to 33,000 by 2035.⁶ Establishing a bridge to replacement activity in renewables is the crucial determinant for avoiding wholesale industrial devastation. Regardless of the exact pace of job losses in oil and gas, the key geological and economic fact is that production in North Sea hydrocarbons has been falling for a quarter of a century, and Britain has been a net energy importer for two decades. This will not change on the whims of the policy levers Ed Miliband reaches for. 

Testing the Just Transition

Oil and gas workers have been promised that the move from fossil fuels to renewables would be life changing in a positive way – as a ‘just transition’ that would repurpose their skills, better reward their efforts, and provide opportunities for future generations. These pledges ring increasingly hollow. Grangemouth has been a crucial staging post in shifting perceptions of oil and gas closures and transition from a possible future to a thoroughly contemporary matter. In July 2024, the impending refinery closure was assessed by the Just Transition Commission, an independent advisory body to the Scottish government established in 2018, as ‘an early litmus test’ of commitments to employment security and living standards protection.⁷ The Commission was formed amid increasing demands for climate action in the late 2010s, when Extinction Rebellion protesters swarmed Scottish streets. It was also an outcome of pressure from two interests who may at first seem like unlikely allies: the environmental movement grouped around Friends of the Earth Scotland and trade unions representing workers in oil and gas. Nevertheless, the two groups have come together in a ‘Just Transition Partnership’.⁸

Legacies of coal, steel, and shipbuilding closures are animating features of Scottish politics in the twenty-first century and powerfully shape the just transition agenda.⁹ Nicola Sturgeon’s administration convened the Commission to formalise links between environmentalists, unions, industry, and government. When she campaigned at the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, Sturgeon conveyed the difficulties faced by Scottish nationalists in distancing themselves from the oil and gas industry, which has been central to arguments for independence for half a century. She also related the winding down of oil and gas production to memories of earlier waves of industrial closure. Sturgeon became politically active during the 1980s as a teenager in Ayrshire, a coal and steel region to the south-west of Glasgow. In 2021, she recalled that ‘I saw and remember first-hand the devastation that is done to people and communities when governments don’t take care to take people along in a transition’. The First Minister emphasised that these experiences were ‘seared into her consciousness’. Reporting by the Press and Journal, which covers the oil-reliant north-east of Scotland, contextualised Sturgeon’s remarks by referring to interviews with local voters who feared that their communities could be left in greatly reduced circumstances as former coal mining areas were.¹⁰

In the opening months of 2024 Riyoko Shibe and I interviewed Grangemouth workers as part of a Just Transition Commission study following the refinery closure announcement in autumn 2023. The experience of earlier closures stood as a potent warning of the dangerous path that lay ahead. These reference points reverberated both for older workers with direct memories of mass unemployment in the 1980s as well as for younger interviewees who had learned about it retrospectively. One younger refinery worker recalled:

The miners’ strike and all that type of stuff was before my time, but you’re well aware when you’re growing up of the impact that that had on our communities. I mean, West Lothian for example, and obviously the Falkirk district as well. So, I think for us, and it’s also the forty-year anniversary since the miners’ strike. It’s absolutely, you actually watch, for example, some of the documentaries on TV at present and you’re actually gobsmacked at the similarities.

A delegation of Unite trade unionists from the Grangemouth complex marched with former miners and their families at a commemoration in March 2024, marking the fortieth anniversary of the 1984-5 strike. Unite’s campaign—‘Keep Grangemouth Working’—also emotively deployed the history of devastation in the coalfields. Speakers from the campaign at trade union rallies often used the slogan ‘we cannot allow oil and gas workers to become the coal miners of our generation’. Unite’s Scottish Secretary, Derek Thomson, explained that this call established a clear link between collective memory, just transition, and commitments to the plight of refinery workers in the 2020s: 

Unite is crystal clear that if a just transition is to mean anything then it must be managed in an orderly and organised way by government to avoid the industrial decimation which was unleashed during the 1980s.¹¹

Corporate Power and Unrelenting Deindustrialisation

The transition narrative appeals to politicians who style themselves as social democrats; it has in turn become a foil for trade unionists to criticise their failings in power. Union grievances at Grangemouth were fuelled by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar’s appearance in a 2024 general election televised debate, where he pledged that a Labour government would save refinery workers’ jobs. Unite were further angered in February 2025, when Keir Starmer addressed Scottish Labour’s conference – by which time it was apparent that Sarwar’s pledge would not be delivered. The previous day, Grangemouth workers had dumped 400 hard hats on the ground of the conference venue, representing the jobs set to be lost at the refinery. In response to the pressure, Starmer claimed credit for the relatively favourable redundancy terms that Unite had negotiated with Petroineos, including eighteen months salary protection. Incorporating the supply chain, more than 2800 jobs were threatened by the refinery closure and most of those workers were not covered by such favourable agreements with employers.¹² There was an eminently understandable frustration behind Unite’s actions as well as political prudence. The union can ill afford to be seen as soft on Labour when its members in Grangemouth are facing job losses and unemployment. The election of a Labour government committed to both enhancing workers’ rights and realising an agenda to make Britain a ‘green industrial superpower’ has proved a disappointment.¹³

The framing of the energy transition is beset by problems when it comes to building a coherent analysis for understanding events at Grangemouth as well as in the North Sea. Two different processes are conveniently tied together to marry saving Scotland’s industrial base and avoiding drastic job losses and unemployment or workforce degradation. The ongoing erosion of employment and production in the North Sea is not due to the energy transition. Neither is the development of a growing offshore wind sector the product of the ongoing decline in production and employment in hydrocarbons. These developments have fundamentally different trajectories and are rooted in distinct changes. Exhaustion of economically viable fields and competition with younger, more promising oil provinces characterises the North Sea. Major oil corporations have been exiting the basin and concentrating on pastures new for decades. In December 2025, Shell, one of the historic leading operators in the North Sea, announced it had outsourced its offshore business to a new company, Adura, to be run as an independent joint venture with Equinor, the Norwegian stateowned energy company.¹⁴ Offshore wind is by contrast a rising sector. The main parallel it has with North Sea oil and gas is its shared dependency on a combination of privately-owned multinationals and foreign governments.¹⁵

Scotland’s unjust transition is conditioned by a trajectory of long-term political and economic power dynamics. Petroineos and its actions at Grangemouth provide a dramatic instance, but one best understood with the benefit of historical hindsight. 

Refining at Grangemouth dates back to the 1920s, with the town rapidly expanding in the 1950s and 1960s as Scottish demand for oil grew. Employment in the local coal mining and shale oil sector, as well as in Glasgow’s older, coal-fired chemical sector, were falling into abeyance. Refinery work expanded alongside plastics and petrochemicals and sustained local prosperity. For a period, Grangemouth was central to a comparatively just transition, one that was guided by public ownership, including the government’s controlling stake in BP, who owned the refinery and petrochemicals plants at the complex. These trends had already begun to reverse as early as the 1970s, when manufacturing employment began falling locally. BP first invested in increasingly capital-intensive forms of production, before exiting from its less profitable downstream activities to concentrate on making money upstream in exploration and drilling. In 2005, BP sold the refinery and petrochemical plants to INEOS, a chemical company which specialised in acquiring unwanted assets.¹⁶ Petroineos was formed six years later as a partnership between INEOS and the Chinese state-owned oil company, PetroChina.¹⁷ In the meantime, there have been ongoing plant closures and job losses at Grangemouth, instigated by INEOS, Petroineos, and smaller companies present at the complex.

Grangemouth ought to be understood within a much longer history of Scottish and British deindustrialisation. Often this is a term invoked to describe the mass job losses and closures of the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, deindustrialisation has been applied to explain the manufacturing jobs crisis that has evolved in the 2020s at strategic sites connected to the carbon economy like Grangemouth and Lindsey refineries or Port Talbot and Scunthorpe steelworks. Yet the onset of sustained job losses in sectors like textiles, coal mining, docks, and the railways can be traced at least back to the 1950s, while overall manufacturing employment peaked in the mid-1960s.¹⁸ Crucially however, these changes were managed on comparatively benign terms in their early phases – employment at Grangemouth compensating for job losses in coal and shale is an exemplary instance. Falling employment in manufacturing has been a consistent feature, including job losses incurred during the Blair and Brown years, which were often explained as the inevitable consequences of ‘globalisation’ or technological change. 

At Grangemouth, the ongoing experience of employment attrition has meant skilled workers scattered to the winds of the global energy sector on the one hand, or to the whims of itinerant contract employment within Britain on the other. In 2024 I interviewed a refinery worker who said that his entire team had responded to the closure announcement by looking for opportunities in Asia. Other interviewees recollected that oil companies had held jobs fairs offering lucrative opportunities to work in the Middle East after a major industrial dispute instigated by Ratcliffe in the autumn of 2013, which ended with diminishing union recognition and pay and pension benefits. Ferret journalist Karin Goodwin confirmed this trend in September 2025 when she interviewed James Differ, a former Grangemouth control room operator who had signed a contract to work in Saudi Arabia.¹⁹ Yet the workers I interviewed did not view the prospect of leaving Grangemouth with optimism, even if it was for relatively favourable conditions in the international oil industry. One refinery worker poignantly underlined the collective sentiment of his colleagues:

We’ve got a community that’s been built round the site, we’ve got skills and we’ve got people that work there. We’ve got the infrastructure there. Why should we not have these jobs when the times comes to move to these industries? Why can we not have it at Grangemouth?

Another interviewee, employed in a white-collar role, reflected that she had already upped sticks before, working in the Caspian during hard times in the North Sea. A fair future for her meant retaining employment and opportunities locally.

Resentment and Renewables

Grangemouth has been promised significant funding, including £200 million from the UK government’s National Wealth Fund, £25 million from the Scottish government, and an additional £14.5 million announced in Rachel Reeves’ autumn budget.²⁰ Most of this funding is dependent on match funding with investors and at the time of writing it has not yet led to significant job creation in green manufacturing on the site. The announced closure of Exxon’s Mossmorran plant only consolidates the fears of a contracting industrial labour market along the Firth of Forth. In April 2024, the Scottish government promised to develop a transition plan for the site, where a future closure was foreseeable, but this promise was not delivered.²¹ These decisions only saw justified scepticism of promises of a ‘just transition’ among oil and gas worker and their families in localities where the industry is an important employer. Just transition has also been exploited by oil companies and an array of Scottish nationalist and rightwing politicians as an argument for lowering taxation and prohibitions on further North Sea oil and gas exploration. Yet these political and corporate forces rarely question the large conglomerates like Exxon who make the crucial decisions that lead to job losses in West Fife and elsewhere.

Earlier major redundancies along the estuary have included job losses in both refining and chemicals at Grangemouth in the 2010s and 2020s, as well as the closure of the Longannet coal-fired power station in 2016.²² Furthermore, the same area has also been central to prior disappointments in wind turbine manufacturing through the two BiFab yards in Fife. Despite the mushrooming of offshore wind, BiFab struggled to obtain and complete orders and went through numerous financial crises, with the company now under its fourth owner since 2017 – the Spanish state-owned shipbuilders, Navantia. The yard at Burntisland has closed whilst the Methil site remains a fledgling part of the revived company along with a yard at Arnish in the Outer Hebrides.²³ Recently hopes have picked up for more extensive development in the Highlands with the announcement of the acquisition of the Port of Nigg by Japanese firm Mitsui and a possible investment at Ardersier by Ming Yang, a Chinese manufacturer.²⁴

These developments, just as much as events at Grangemouth, reveal Scotland’s dependency on multinational investment and its vulnerability to decisions made in distant boardrooms. A November 2023 visit to Beijing by Angus Robertson, Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, provided a defining image of the economic power Scotland is subjected to when he visited PetroChina in the wake of the closure announcement to plead the case for the refinery.²⁵ The pace of transition and the key choices over employment have been outsourced by both the UK and Scottish governments. It is privately-owned companies like Mitsui and INEOS, alongside private equity-backed independent oil companies like Harbour Energy and foreign state-owned enterprises like PetroChina, the French EDF, Irish ESB, and Denmark’s Ørsted who are the key agents in shaping the industrial future.  

Some Christmas cheer was provided at Grangemouth in December 2025 with the announcement of investments in biotechnology production by two Scottish-owned biotech manufacturing firms, supported by the UK and Scottish government.²⁶ In addition, a much larger public investment was announced to retain INEOS chemicals production, involving £125 million of UK government funding to secure jobs at the complex.²⁷ These developments suggest some potential for a future based on industrial policy that prioritises developing a patchwork of domestically-controlled businesses with significant public involvement. They also raise questions over the efficacy and accountability of handing public money to firms like INEOS with a record of disinvestment and closure. Yet Scotland’s renewables sector as a whole bears the scars of decades of deindustrialisation. Recently, Nicholas Beuret perceptively suggested that British renewables work resembles an ‘installation economy’.²⁸ In Scotland, employment in renewables only rarely takes the form of green chemicals manufacturing or welding turbines, despite the prominence this sort of activity has in the iconography of a just transition for the oil and gas workforce. Research by the Scottish Trades Union Congress demonstrates that renewables employment in Scotland is increasingly characterised by jobs related to installing and servicing low-emission vehicles and related infrastructures, as well as heat pumps, along with energy-efficient lighting. These are often comparatively menial and low-productivity positions. Between 2022 and 2023, turnover per capita fell as employment in the sector expanded. The average renewables firm employed just two workers, meaning that many of the 15,500 concerns are sole traders.²⁹

Less than six months after Grangemouth refined its last barrel of oil, another employer in the Falkirk area, Alexander Dennis, was at a standstill. Alexander Dennis manufacture electric buses. Like BiFab, they ought to be a key part of Scotland’s manufacturing future but like BiFab they are subject to international competition for key procurement contracts even in domestic markets. Again, as with BiFab, Alexander Dennis has origins in a locally controlled company but is now owned by a foreign multinational. Unlike at Grangemouth, a more decisive early intervention by the Scottish government has resulted in temporary, rather than permanent, idleness. A six-month furlough scheme is keeping staff on the books as the plant is hopefully prepared for further orders.³⁰ Both these sectors should be areas where active industrial policy could use the levers of procuring capital goods for the benefit of Scottish workers. Even in the context of private ownership of buses and electricity generation, the conditions of licencing bus operators and offshore wind could be utilised to ensure business for firms like BiFab and Alexander Dennis. Instead of using considerable public power to create favourable conditions, both the UK and Scottish government are too often reacting to evolving industrial crises in the fossil fuel and renewable sectors. In some cases, where more ambitious policies were set, such as Scottish government’s commitments to develop a publicly-owned energy company to deliver cheaper bills, they have been abandoned.³¹ The political viability of the UK government’s roll-out of GB Energy urgently depends on visibility in the form of jobs created and saved, consumer and worker benefit and local prosperity in Falkirk, Fife and Aberdeenshire alike. 

Weekly protests targeting the Cladhan Hotel in Falkirk, which houses asylum seekers, sound a warning as to the price of failure to deliver the green industrial agenda. At their largest, these protests have attracted up to 1,000 people. Farright agitators have asserted that the men housed at the hotel threaten the safety of local women and children, but they have also pointed to the threat of growing local unemployment and economic depression after the refinery closure and trouble at Alexander Dennis.³² Reform will present a potent electoral challenge at the Scottish Parliament election in May 2026. Their campaign is emphasising oil job losses, blaming the environmental sympathies of the John Swinney and Keir Starmer governments. Sustained failure by both London and Edinburgh administrations to deliver either manufacturing jobs or cheaper and more secure energy is eroding public faith in the promises of politicians and in the efficacy of collectivism, national ambitions, and state action. The unjust transition is breeding a toxic politics of resentment. 

Ewan Gibbs is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class (Verso, 2026) and Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (University of London Press, 2021).

Notes

1. @ScottishTUC, x.com, 3 December 2025. 
2. ‘Grangemouth Refinery Stops Processing Crude Oil’, bbc.co.uk, 29 April 2025
3. ‘North Sea Oil and Gas Firm Petrofac files for Administration’, bbc.co.uk, 27 October 2025.
4. ‘Harbour Energy Cuts another 100 North Sea jobs’, energyvoice.com, 1 December 2025.
5. ‘ExxonMobil to close Mossmorran Plastics Plant with 400 jobs at risk’, STV News, 18 November 2025. 
6. Energy Transition Institute, Striking the Balance: Building a Sustainable UK Offshore Energy Workforce, Robert Gordon University, 2025, p15. 
7. Just Transition Commission, A Just Transition for Grangemouth, 2025, p5.
8. ‘About Us’, jtp.scot. 
9. Andrew Perchard, ‘“Broken Men” and “Thatcher’s Children”: Memory and Legacy in Scotland’s Coalfields’, International Labor and Working-Class History, No 84, 2013, pp78-98.
10. Calum Ross, ‘Nicola Sturgeon Vows to Protect North-East from Post-Oil “Devastation”’, pressandjournal.co.uk, 5 May 2021.
11. Derek Thomson, ‘The Fight to Keep Grangemouth Working’, Scottish Left Review, Vol 143, December 2024-January 2025, p9. 
12. Ewan Gibbs, ‘Goodbye to Grangemouth’, London Review of Books, Vol 47 No 16, 2025, pp28-30.
13. ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’, gov.uk. 
14. ‘Shell and Equinor Complete Formation of Adura’, shell.com, 1 December 2025.
15. Sophie Flinders, ‘Who Owns the North Sea?’, common-wealth.org; Scottish Trades Union Congress, Employment and Corporate Practice in Scotland’s Wind Sector: Workers’ Perspective and Company Survey, 2025. 
16. Riyoko Shibe, ‘Petrochemicals, Pollution, and the Moral Economy of Noxious Industry: Grangemouth, Scotland, from 1951 to 1989’, Enterprise & Society, Vol 269 No 3, 2025, pp1057-1084. 
17. ‘About Us’, petroineos.com.  
18. Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History’, Modern British History, Vol 27 No 1, 2016, pp76–99.
19. Karin Goodwin, ‘Power Struggle: The Billionaire, the Chinese Oil Giant and Grangemouth’s Forgotten Workers’, theferret.scot, 7 September 2025. 
20. ‘UK Government to Announce Grangemouth Funding in Budget’, bbc.co.uk, 24 November 2025.
21. ‘Climate Change Action: Policy Package’, gov.scot, 18 April 2024. 
22. Ewan Gibbs and Riyoko Shibe, The Grangemouth Refinery Closure: Workers’ Perspectives, Just Transition Commission, 2024, p11.
23. Ewan Gibbs, ‘Greening in Northern Europe: Offshore Wind Power’ in John A. Matthews and Arkebe Oqubay (eds.) The Oxford Handbook on the Greening of Economic Development, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp538-549.
24. ‘Chinese Firm Planning £1.5bn Turbine Plant in Scotland’, bbc.co.uk, 10 October 2025; ‘Highland Port to be Expanded in Upgrade Plan’, bbc.co.uk, 20 October 2025.
25. @AngusRobertson, x.com, 23 November 2023. 
26. ‘Biotech Jobs Boost for Grangemouth site’, bbc.co.uk, 11 December 2025. 
27. David Henderson, ‘New £150m funding package to protect jobs at Grangemouth’, bbc.co.uk, 17 December 2025.
28. Nicholas Beuret, Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition, Verso, 2025, p51. 
29. STUC Report on Scotland’s Low Carbon Energy Economy, Scottish Trades Union Congress, 2025.
30. ‘Securing Bus Manufacturing Jobs in Scotland’, gov.scot, 15 September 2025.
31. Catrine Bussey and Peter A. Walker, ‘Scottish Energy company “Not Something We Are Able To Do”’, insider.co.uk, 7 January 2025.
32. Richie Venton, ‘Scotland’s Trade Unions need to Mobilise Against the Far Right’, national.scot, 18 August 2025.