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Measurement and Testing TALKING POINT Grangemouth closure leaves Scotland without a single oil refi nery


Scotland’s only oil refi nery, located in Grangemouth, is set to close by the summer of 2025, leading to the loss of around 400 jobs. The refi nery, operated by Petroineos, has struggled to remain competitive in the global market, particularly against newer, more effi cient sites in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The closure is part of the company’s strategy to adapt to shifting energy demands as the world moves away from fossil fuels.


Petroineos has stated that the aging refi nery, which opened in 1924, has become fi nancially unsustainable, with daily losses of around $500,000 (£383,000). The company projects total losses of $200 million (£153 million) by the end of 2024. With the demand for traditional fuels like petrol and diesel declining, especially in light of upcoming bans on new petrol and diesel vehicles, Petroineos decided that continuing operations was no longer viable. The closure marks the end of an era for a refi nery that has been a major player in Scotland’s energy infrastructure for nearly a century.


To mitigate the impact of the closure, Petroineos plans to convert the site into a fuel import terminal. This facility will focus on importing petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, and kerosene into Scotland, ensuring continued access to these fuels while signifi cantly reducing the workforce. The terminal will employ fewer than 100 people, a sharp decline from the current workforce of 475, marking a signifi cant reduction in jobs.


The closure has triggered widespread concern among workers


and unions. Employees have expressed frustration over the decision, with many feeling that more could have been done to keep the refi nery open or to extend its operations during the transition. Chris Hamilton, a plant operator at Grangemouth, described the closure as a “kick in the teeth,” particularly as the site has long been a cornerstone of the local economy and job market.


Union leaders have voiced their dissatisfaction with both the Scottish and UK governments, accusing them of failing to protect workers and industries dependent on fossil fuels during the transition to cleaner energy. The refi nery’s closure is expected to affect not only the 400 workers directly employed at the site but also potentially around 3,000 additional jobs linked to the wider supply chain, according to Unite.


In response, both governments have announced a £100 million joint investment plan aimed at supporting local energy projects and exploring potential new uses for the Grangemouth site. This includes Project Willow, a feasibility study investigating whether new green industries could be established at the site to provide long-term employment opportunities. However, many are concerned that these efforts will not materialize quickly enough to save the jobs at stake.


The closure of the Grangemouth refi nery is part of a broader shift in the global energy market as demand for fossil fuels continues to decline. The refi nery, which supplies 65% of Scotland’s refi ned oil products and accounts for around 14% of


the UK’s total refi ning capacity, has been central to Scotland’s energy infrastructure for decades. However, with the world moving towards renewable energy and the eventual phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles, Petroineos determined that maintaining the aging facility was no longer economically feasible.


The planned transformation of the site into a fuel import terminal is intended to safeguard Scotland’s fuel supply in the short term. Petroineos expects the terminal to be operational by the summer of 2025, and while it will require a smaller workforce, it represents a step towards adapting to the new energy landscape. Nonetheless, the loss of jobs and the uncertainty surrounding the future of the site have left many in the local community feeling uneasy about what lies ahead.


Robust miniature pressure controllers


Bronkhorst’s IQ+FLOW series of miniature mass fl ow and pressure meters and controllers is widely used by equipment manufacturers in the analytical market. Due to the application of chip sensors and mini-valves the footprint of single-channel instruments is only 20 x 40 mm. This is a great advantage for manufacturers of desktop equipment, who are always looking for optimal space effi ciency.


The IQ+FLOW product line has now been extended with pressure instruments with media-isolated pressure sensors. The sensor chip is protected by a stainless-steel diaphragm and oil-fi lled compartment. With this new option, the instruments can handle a much wider variety of media than before, including thin gases such as hydrogen and helium. According to the requirements of the analytical lab sector, the instruments have low-outgassing and clean-wetted parts.


IQ+ FLOW series are available in three confi gurations: single-channel versions for either inline or top mount integration and multi-channel versions. Compact 2- or 3-channel instruments can be confi gured on customer specifi cation to measure or control the mass fl ow and/or the upstream or downstream pressure in a system.


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Real-time optical technique for determining impurities in hydrogen gas production


Chromacity Ltd. reports on the development of a next-generation optical solution for the detection of contaminants in renewable hydrogen.


While renewable hydrogen is widely acknowledged to play a growing role in decarbonising the economy, challenges remain to control its purity. With supply from diverse sources including green, blue and regasifi ed hydrogen from storage media, users need confi dence that the gas they use is of suffi cient quality that it will not damage key components such as fuel cells or infrastructure.


Working in partnership with the Herriot Watt University* and Fraunhofer UK*, a new solution combining high brightness, coherent Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) laser technology from Chromacity Ltd., with advanced FTIR spectroscopy techniques, has been shown to offer advantages over current technologies. ISO 14687:2019, which defi nes thresholds for a wide range of contaminants in hydrogen for fuel cells, is being used to benchmark this exciting development.


Julian Hayes, CEO of Chromacity Ltd commented “Existing optical solutions for determining the purity of renewable hydrogen either compromise on spectral resolution and detection sensitivity or are overly complex making them expensive which limits deployment. Likewise, the implementation of sensitive gas chromatography techniques is limited because the instrumentation is costly, bulky, and online sampling is challenging.”


He added “Based on a single light source, our solution removes the complexities of multi-source optical techniques and so lowers the cost of ownership. The broad, tuneable bandwidth of the OPO laser allows many contaminants to be detected, including broad or complex chemical signatures. Our instrument is designed to be used in-line and has been shown to monitor the fi ve key contaminants in the renewable hydrogen production process (as detailed in ISO 14687) in real time”.


Mr Hayes concluded “Having been successfully tested in the lab on representative gas samples, the next stage of developing the system is to enable users to use live real-time data to drive optimisation of the production process.”


PIN OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2024


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