Where Next For Grangemouth?
Craig Dalzell
The Scottish Government risks throwing good money after bad in its latest promise to take £25 million from the remaining ScotWind fund and use it to prop up Grangemouth.
This is in addition to the more than £100mn already earmarked between the Scottish and UK Governments amongst which is “Project Willow” – a plan that was launched to reduce the carbon footprint of the refinery and to find uses for it beyond fossil fuels.
That plan, however, was upended when owners Ineos decided to close down the plant because in this country we let billionaires decide the future of nationally strategic assets instead of our democratic governments.
I’ve written before about my position on a lot of this. I’m a full advocate for a Just Transition for workers who are facing losing their job as their workplace reaches its entirely foreseen and entirely necessary closure or reformation in light of the climate emergency. What I’m appalled about is politicians using that idea of a Just Transition as an excuse to do anything about that transition. As I wrote last week, “No ban without a plan” is an entirely justifiable slogan – except for the people who were supposed to come up with the plan.
Grangemouth’s days as a refinery are numbered no matter what. If we decide to take our climate obligations seriously then there is no place for a refinery of that scale (even the non-fuel uses of hydrocarbons must be drastically scaled back even as non-hydrocarbon sources are found – more on that in a bit) but more serious is the prospect of rising sea levels. Grangemouth – and most of Falkirk – are some of Scotland’s lowest lying and most vulnerable areas and even in the best Green New Deal scenarios are likely to go below sea level – possibly within the lifetimes of some of the kids of the workers of the current plant. There was a plan to build a giant sea wall to protect the plant (and some of the town, I guess…) but we’ll have to see if that comes into doubt given news of the closure.
Looking at that Project Willow though betrays some of the short term or otherwise misguided thinking about the scale of the economic transition we should be facing, so I thought it’s worth highlighting that by way of the three projects announced as part of this week’s funding as potential outcomes from Grangemouth’s post fossil fuel future.
1) Low Carbon Hydrogen
This is one of the Scottish Government’s great rebranding exercises. Hydrogen is undoubtedly going to become an important resource in the future (though less so than you may imagine – it’s not going to be used much in transport and it absolutely shouldn’t be piped into your home to be burned for heat and cooking). Hydrogen isn’t quite like methane gas in that there aren’t huge stores of it underground waiting to be mined and extracted (there is a bit, usually associated with said methane, but don’t expect another big mining boom there). Instead, it’s usually created by splitting it off from various substances using various means. In the sector, these methods are given a colour. “Black” hydrogen is created by heating coal with steam to create hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “Blue” hydrogen, by refining methane into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “Pink” hydrogen by using electricity from a nuclear reactor to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and “Green” hydrogen by using renewable electricity to split water. You’ll notice that most of the environmental attention is on “Green” hydrogen, for obvious reasons, but also notice that the fossil fuel derived hydrogen produces carbon dioxide just as burning it would. In fact, creating one uni of “blue” hydrogen creates as much CO2 as burning the methane. Actually, in the real world, trying to create “blue” hydrogen can create MORE climate damage than burning the CO2 because no real world process is perfect and methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 so methane leaks become a serious problem.
In steps the Scottish Government marketing scheme. They pretend that they can deal with the carbon emissions from the blue hydrogen by saying that at some point in the future someone will invent a wizard who can magic away the emissions…sorry, that someone will invent a technology called “carbon capture” that will prevent the emissions (it amounts to the same wish) and that they can ignore the methane leaks. If they do this, then suddenly the “blue” hydrogen is “low carbon hydrogen” and it’ll solve all of our climate problems without having to stop extracting methane from underground.
2) Airline Fuel
Another proposal is that sources “like forestry and agricultural waste, used cooking oil and carbon captured from the air” could be turned into jet fuel for airlines. Turning waste into hydrocarbons is not a bad idea and will be absolutely essential for some things like production of pharmaceuticals, fertilisers and other organic chemistry. Simultaneously, using hydrogen for jet fuel is essentially a non-starter because while 1kg of hydrogen is just about the most mass dense chemical energy source possible, it’s also one of the least volume dense fuel sources so jets physically can’t carry enough hydrogen to fly anywhere useful. But the truth of the Green New Deal is that we fly far, far too much. We need to find other ways of moving people and things across the planet (my vision is basically going back to cruise liners and airships for people and realising that when it comes to cargo, we ship fewer consumer goods around the place in a Circular Economy and nearly eliminate all of the FUEL we transport as part of the current economy). The idea that we can run the world’s current fleet of aircraft off of cooking oil and forestry scraps is a complete non-starter. My friend and comrade Simon Brooke recently calculated that to create enough biofuel to satisfy current airline demand would require the equivalent land use required to feed more than 3.75 billion people. There may well be some niche uses for airline biofuels (probably military. There’s always money for bombs, regardless of the cost to the rest of us) but building Scotland’s industrial future on turning our forests into cheap jaunts to the rising seas near where the beaches of the Costa del Sol used to be isn’t one of them.
3) “Clean e-Fuels”
Pretty much the same problem as aircraft fuel is the issue of creating fuel for other vehicles but here we have a) a much larger problem due to the much higher volume of vehicles and b) and much EASIER problem because the technology has already essentially been solved. Battery vehicles are more or less the solution for everything smaller than a truck and journeys shorter than a nearly non-stop trans-continental trip that, for some reason, can’t go be train or ship. Add in that a 1-for-1 replacement of vehicles is nowhere near good enough. Replacing everyone’s petrol car with an eV car will just lead to us all still stuck in traffic jams and breathing in the pollution caused by car tyres. The Scottish Government’s plan to reduce car miles by 20% is in danger of being missed through inaction and progress towards not just allowing but actively pushing people towards other forms of transport are going far too slowly (Three years after writing this piece, I still can’t hire a community cargo bike so I can safely cycle to get my shopping, though they have fixed the patch of road I mentioned in that article where the signs told drivers to actively swerve into cyclists). Once again, gambling Scotland’s industrial future on a consumer demand that both won’t be there in the future and cannot be allowed to be there in the future is not a smart use of public money.
An actual future for Grangemouth?
So what would I do instead of the Government proposals? Even in a Green New Deal world, Scotland will have need for refining to produce hydrogen and biofeedstocks for chemical processing but this is distinct from trying to keep it running as a “low carbon” fuel processor. If we factor in the sea level rise risks at the plant I do wonder if a better idea wouldn’t be smaller and more distributed refining (possibly down to on-site generation when it comes to things like hydrogen). There may be a case for nationalising Grangemouth but I would be seriously concerned that this (or, indeed, the current plan of not nationalising it) would be used by Ineos as a reason to walk away from cleanup operations. After decades of extracting profits from Scotland, it should be unacceptable for the owners to not join the long, long list of people and companies who have turned significant portions of Scotland into another “brownfield site”.
Of course, in some senses the question “What would I do?” is a false question because the reason we’re scrabbling around for solutions to the current crisis is that no-one listened when people warned that the crisis was coming. We could have avoided billionaires clogging up our democracy with their selfish demands. We could have created graceful and gradual transitions for workers or we might even have avoided creating jobs at risk of transition in the first place.
But we are where we are with this crisis and it’ll be up to the Scottish Government to get us out.
My worry and my warning is that they are setting us up for another crisis to come by investing us down what is clearly the wrong leg of the tech tree. I can only hope that we’re not going to be back here in a few years scrambling to “transition” those workers too.
Image Credit: Ian Paterson - CC-BY-SA
