MOSCOW (MRC) -- The Grangemouth refining and chemicals complex has only been shutdown twice in the last 40 years; during the Unite strike in 2008 and again this October in preparation for the strike that Unite announced last week, according to the company's press release.
The company claims that it was being encouraged to restart the complex immediately, but this is impossible to do on safety grounds, which Ineos explains, as follows:
The Grangemouth site is 3 times the size of the city of London and it is an incredibly complex system of manufacturing plants all connected by miles of pipes carrying highly flammable materials. Shutting down the site and restarting again is not like switching the lights off and on. It takes days to shut down properly and it takes weeks to bring it back up again.
When Unite forced Ineos to shut down in 2008, there were two major incidents and it took 8 weeks to get back to normal. A repeat of that this time would mean no production before Christmas.
INEOS is considering now the risks associated with restart and the additional risks that may be caused by further industrial action.
As MRC reported ealier, Ineos is considering closing its Grangemouth facility in what has been described by union representatives as a "shocking" attempt to browbeat the work. Company chairman Jim Ratcliffe described the plant as "expensive", citing "old-fashioned pensions" as a being a prime cause for concern. He was quoted as saying: "To have a future, it needs cheap feedstocks and a sensible cost structure. If we can’t resolve those issues it would need to shut down."
On 13 October Ineos invited the Unite union for talks in a bid to prevent workers at Ineos’s Grangemouth, United Kingdom operations from going on 48-hour strike on 20 October. These talks were intended to find a way to resolve the dispute over Stephen Deans, an employee representative on the site and to prevent strike action planned by the union, as well as financial issues. Ineos said it has started the process of taking the plants down in anticipation of the strike.
INEOS Group Limited is a privately owned multinational chemicals company consisting of 15 standalone business units, headquartered in Rolle, Switzerland and with its registered office in Lyndhurst, United Kingdom. It is the fourth largest chemicals company in the world measured by revenues (after BASF, Dow Chemical and LyondellBasell) and the largest privately owned company in the United Kingdom.
MRC