You have probably heard of the Nationwide Grid, the community of pylons and electrical energy infrastructure guaranteeing the nation is equipped with energy. You are in all probability conscious that there’s a related nationwide community of fuel pipelines sending methane into hundreds of thousands of our boilers.
However far fewer individuals, even among the many infrastructure cognoscenti, are even faintly aware of the UK Ethylene Pipeline System. But this pipeline community, obscure because it is likely to be, is likely one of the essential elements of Britain’s industrial infrastructure. And it is also a helpful clue to assist clarify why the federal government has simply introduced it is spending greater than £120m to bail out the chemical plant at Grangemouth in Scotland.
Ethylene is a kind of precursor chemical compounds important for the manufacture of all types of on a regular basis merchandise. React it with terephthalic acid and you find yourself with polyester. Mix it with chlorine and you find yourself with PVC. And while you polymerise ethylene itself you find yourself with polyethylene – an important plastic on the earth.
Why Grangemouth issues
Ethylene is, in brief, a really huge deal. Therefore, why, a few years in the past, a pipeline was constructed to make sure Britain’s varied chemical vegetation would have a dependable provide of the stuff. The pipes related the important thing nodes in Britain’s chemical compounds infrastructure: the vegetation within the north of Cheshire, which derived chemical compounds from salt, the huge Wilton petrochemical plant in Teesside and, up in Scotland, an important level within the community – Grangemouth.
The refinery would suck in oil and fuel from the North Sea and switch it into ethane, which it might then “crack”, an energy-hungry course of that entails heating it as much as phenomenally excessive temperatures. A few of that ethylene can be used on website, however massive volumes would even be despatched down the pipeline. It might be pumped all the way down to Runcorn, the place the previous ICI chlor-alkali plant, now owned by INEOS, would use it to make PVC. It might be despatched to Wilton, the place it might be changed into polyethylene and polyester.
That is the primary essential factor to understand about this community – it’s important for the operation of an entire collection of vegetation, lots of them run by fully totally different corporations.
The second key factor to notice is that, after the closure of the cracker at Wilton (now owned by Saudi firm Sabic) and the ExxonMobil plant at Mossmorran in Fife, Grangemouth is the final plant standing. Whereas the refinery now not makes use of North Sea oil and fuel, as a substitute transport in ethane from the US, it nonetheless makes its personal ethylene.
So when INEOS started consulting on plans to shut that ethylene cracker, officers down south in Westminster started to panic. The issue wasn’t simply the five hundred or so jobs which may have been misplaced in Grangemouth. It was the domino impact that might feed all through the sector. Impulsively, all these vegetation on the different ends of the pipeline can be affected too. In observe, the closure might need eventuated in additional than a thousand job losses – perhaps extra.
What’s occurring now?
Picture:
Work floor to a halt at JLR’s Wolverhampton manufacturing facility after a cyber assault. Pic: PA
However whereas this bundle will undoubtedly present Christmas cheer right here in Grangemouth at present, the federal government is left dealing with two distinct issues.
Reactive fairly than strategic
The primary is that for all that the chancellor and enterprise secretary (who’re themselves planning to go to Grangemouth at present) are eager to pitch this newest transfer as a coherent a part of their industrial technique, it is exhausting to not see it as one thing else. Removed from showing strategic, as a substitute they appear reactive. To the extent that they’ve a coherent industrial technique, it principally appears to contain forking out public cash when a given plant is near closure. In the event that they weren’t already, Britain’s industrialists will at present be questioning to themselves: what wouldn’t it take to get ourselves a few of this cash in future?
The disaster continues
The second problem is that the Grangemouth bailout may be very unlikely to finish the disaster spreading throughout Britain’s chemical compounds sector. A collection of vegetation – some outstanding, others much less so – have closed prior to now few years. The chemical compounds sector – as soon as one of the essential within the economic system – has seen its financial output drop by greater than 20% prior to now three years alone.
This isn’t only a UK-specific story. One thing related is going on throughout a lot of Europe. However for a lot of chemical compounds corporations, it merely does not add as much as make investments and construct within the UK any extra – a product in a part of rules and in a part of excessive power prices. In brief, this story is not over but. There will likely be extra twists and turns to return.
