The closure of Grangemouth’s refinery sums up Labour’s Net Zero muddle

Another grim milestone in Britain’s elective deindustrialisation was reached today: Scotland’s only remaining petrochemical plant, Grangemouth in Fife, ceased refining crude oil after more than half a century of processing output from the Forties field in the North Sea.

It was hardly a surprise. PetroIneos, the part-Chinese-owned company, announced last year that Grangemouth was to become a terminal for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) imported from abroad. But today’s news is significant because nothing better exposes the contradictory state of British energy policy.

Despite Britain having substantial reserves of hydrocarbons in the North Sea – approximately 24 billion barrels – the UK government is choosing to switch to costly imports, which are likely to be more carbon-intensive than our own supplies, since much of it is transported thousands of miles by tanker. Moreover, much of the LNG we import annually from America is extracted using hydraulic fracturing (fracking): a method banned here.