COOLING towers belch steam, gas flares rise over 100 metres, lights, as dazzling as a Christmas display, turn the night sky a dusky orange. This is the kind of infernal landscape that inspired Ridley Scott’s opening sequence in Blade Runner – in fact Scott drew on the similar Teeside panorama of his own youth. Only it’s not a fictional dystopia. This is a real industry with a real footprint. From Ineos’s 1,700 acres of land at Grangemouth, in 2019, 3.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere, according to SEPA figures.

A third of the total emissions from companies in Scotland which have a mandatory reporting duty, are emitted from this site. It represents a panorama of the fossil fuel age, from which we are too slowly turning. Scotland’s only refinery can feel like the end of something, the last days of a belligerent old dragon, yet even in this age of net zero targets it still flares. The Grangemouth site still accounts for around 3-4 percent of Scotland’s GDP. It remains a symbol, as COP26 approaches, of the fact that we in Scotland are still a long way from weaning ourselves off oil.

The Grangemouth refinery first started operating in 1924 as Scottish oils. Later, it would later be acquired by BP, then in 2005 by Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS. Along the way there have been industrial relations flares as well as gas burn offs. INEOS has also been a key player in the push for fracking, part of the “dash for gas” now banned in the UK.

The refinery itself is now run by Petroineos, a joint venture between INEOS and the Chinese state-backed company PetroChina. But the Grangemouth site hosts more than a refinery – it is a producer of plastic pellets, manufactured mostly from ethane imported from the shale fields of the Untied States.

Last year, Petroineos announced the mothballing of the oldest crude oil distillation units, as well as its fluid catalytic cracking unit, all of which had been shut since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It even reached out for state support, asking for £500 million.

The lights of Grangemouth remain bright. They still dazzle. But we now know they come with a terrible cost. While those flares still burn, greenhouse gases continue to be discharged. The Grangemouth refinery is a reminder of human slowness to shift, our clinging, in Scotland, to the dragons of the fossil fuel age..