More UK oil refineries will follow Grangemouth and Immingham in a “vicious circle” of closure if Labour don’t change their opposition to domestic production, it was warned today.
The Lindsey refinery in Immingham, Lincolnshire will close its doors in October, after owners Prax went into administration.
UK energy minister Michael Shanks said “no credible offers have been made to purchase the entire refinery and it will be winding down operations”. Around 625 jobs will be lost.
It follows the end of production at Grangemouth, leaving only four refineries for the whole of the UK.
Shadow Scottish secretary Andrew Bowie has now warned there are “serious questions for our energy security and resilience”.
Responding to a statement on the crisis in the House of Commons today, the West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine Tory MP said Labour energy secretary Ed Miliband’s carbon taxes have pushed industry “through the looking glass”.
“We cannot escape the fundamental crisis facing our manufacturing sector,” he said.
“Jim Ratcliffe said the sector is ‘facing extinction’ because of ‘enormously high energy prices’ and ‘crippling carbon tax bills’.
“The Secretary of State knows it to be true – he has exempted some industry from paying his net zero levies, recusing specific businesses from paying the extortionate green subsidy costs — a ridiculous situation that sees subsidies being paid by government to business to exempt them from charges being imposed by government.
“We are truly through the looking glass now.
“His department is wilfully destroying the oil and gas industry with hostile language and an impossible fiscal regime, while overseeing the destruction of the UK’s industrial base through the perpetuated high cost of industrial energy.
“This is not simply managed decline – it is accelerated decline driven by ideology, steered from Whitehall.”
Mr Bowie said later: “Labour policies in Westminster, alongside the SNP’s opposition to oil and gas, are only fuelling a vicious circle of problems for domestic energy.”
