Green shoots Grangemouth attempts 'just transition' to era of jobs and hope

Every morning in Grangemouth, chemists at Celtic Renewables's small factory feed a vial of microbes with a precisely tailored cocktail of food - liquid residues from the scotch whisky industry.

- Jasper Jolly Severin Carrell

Every morning in Grangemouth, chemists at Celtic Renewables's small factory feed a vial of microbes with a precisely tailored cocktail of food - liquid residues from the scotch whisky industry. In vessels surrounded by a web of metal pipes and stainless steel valves, the microbes multiply into a starter solution for batches of acetone, butanol and ethanol - chemicals essential for countless everyday products.

Celtic Renewables wants more: a plant 10 times its current size. That could form part of plans to sustain Scotland's chemicals industry after a crushing blow: closure of the town's 100-year-old refinery in April, with the loss of 400 jobs. The complex will be reduced to a fuel import terminal, staffed by 75 people. Up to 4,600 jobs in the supply chain could also be affected.

Closure has made Grangemouth one of the earliest tests of a "just transition": the idea that the economy can move relatively painlessly from fossil fuels to net zero, helped by judicious government interventions to spur new jobs in place of the old.

The Labour government fears that failure could mean voters turn their backs on it - and on the pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 - throughout what remains of Scotland's largely fossil fuel-dependent industry. Climate action by the government remains popular in Britain, but parties on the right, particularly Nigel Farage's Reform UK, believe opposition to net zero can win them power.

As the government last week unveiled a new industrial strategy, this article - second in a series on the battle for Britain's deindustrialised areas - looks at the future for one of Scotland's industrial icons.

Since the second world war, deindustrialisation has wiped out much of the coal mining, shipbuilding and steelmaking in Scotland's central belt from Glasgow to Edinburgh. But Grangemouth held out, refining crude oil to feed Scotland's cars and the planes taking off from Edinburgh and Glasgow.