PETROINEOS announced in September last year that it would close the Grangemouth oil refinery in the second quarter of 2025, laying off 400 staff in the process.
Last month, those workers received redundancy letters and leaving dates. While the new Willow report recommends up to £13 billion of investment in the town to transform it into a green energy hub in 20 years’ time, refinery workers will lose their jobs within the next 12 months.
Mhairi Hay, director of Curriculum for the STEM and construction department of Forth Valley College said: “If you’ve left school and gone to work for an employer, and a very highly valued employer, you’ve done an apprenticeship, you’ve been there 20 years – it’s scary to write a CV, it’s scary to go to an interview, but to go into a totally different industry, that makes it even more challenging.”
Forth Valley College was given emergency funding in October last year to work with outgoing Grangemouth employees and identify their training needs for moving into new employment. This is on top of the £4 million Skills Transition Centre the college is establishing as part of the £100m Falkirk and Grangemouth Growth Deal.
I went to the college’s Falkirk campus, just a couple of miles from the refinery, to see for myself the facilities that Grangemouth leavers will have access to.
It seems that the prospects for retraining and finding new employment are relatively positive but there is still a huge amount of uncertainty about where these jobs will be and whether Grangemouth’s green industrial future will have the workforce it needs.
Last year, Dave Reay, co-chair of Scotland’s Just Transition Commission, said that further education colleges are “probably the greatest ally any government or business has in realising a just transition to net zero”.
Indeed, for a further education college, working with employers, training people mid-career, and responding to industry needs is nothing new.
Forth Valley, for example, has recently been running a free course for plumbers in heat pump technology. It’s already training new students in hydrogen technology ahead of Scotland’s transition away from natural gas.
However, Hay says most Grangemouth workers won’t need huge amounts of training to move into greener industries – she says 85% of “green skills” are simply traditional skills in a different context. Half of Grangemouth’s workforce is in business support roles. Procurement, HR and administration is roughly the same for most companies, green or not.
For technical staff, Hay points out that refining oil is a distillation process – a refinery worker could easily go into whisky distilling or chemical production.
But rather than selecting a few generic courses for Grangemouth workers, a key part of Forth Valley’s work is offering tailored support.
While Skills Development Scotland and Petroineos itself is offering financial advice and mental health and job application support, Forth Valley offers a skills assessment to help workers understand their existing skills, the job they want to do and what extra skills – if any – they will need to move into that job.
“It’s about people taking responsibility and charge for their own destiny in a really difficult, challenging time,” Hay says.
She says some Grangemouth workers have said that they want to shift career completely into teaching or health and social care, in which case the college can support them to apply for those courses.
Some want to continue working in oil and gas but move offshore, which requires an offshore survival course that the college can offer.
Those who want to transition into renewable energy will need to retrain but will not need a whole new qualification. The college is working with wind energy companies to offer a skills course that will get Grangemouth employees up to speed in six weeks.
The college is coming to the end of its first pot of retraining funding, and while further money for the 2025/26 financial year has been promised, it’s uncertain how much this will be.
The college’s new Skills Transition Centre can help plug these gaps; with a new building opened in 2020, the former Forth Valley director decided that the skills transition centre wouldn’t be bricks and mortar, but kit and technology.
This funding has been spent on improving the college’s renewables workshop, where students can learn to deal with solar panels, heat pumps and other renewables technologies.
The college has also started teaching drone skills, which are increasingly helpful in construction planning, and is investing in augmented reality simulations for many of its practical skills such as welding.
But after training, there is less clarity about where the jobs for Grangemouth leavers will be. Hay says several energy industry companies have directly contacted Petroineos about hiring some former staff but these jobs will not be in the Grangemouth area.
The key problem, though, is timing. While investment is pouring into Grangemouth – the area is set to receive a further £200m from the UK Government’s National Wealth Fund – none of the new industries that are promised will materialise in time for Grangemouth leavers. Hay said: “A true just transition would have been the refinery shutting but as it was scaling down, people were stepping into those new jobs that had been created. There’s a bit of a cliff edge and then we’ve got to come back up again.”
While government has a moral obligation to support Grangemouth workers to stay in employment, there is also a strategic need to retain highly skilled workers.
Many of these workers could move abroad to continue working in their current field. Even if they do stay in the UK, they are likely to move to places where energy companies are currently based.
Who’s to say they will want to move back to Grangemouth when a new hydrogen plant or biofuel refinery finally begins construction?
Hay said: “It’s about how we successfully help people move into new and ideally greener, cleaner jobs, but at the moment, some of these jobs are maybe not quite there … [and] we don’t want to lose the skills. We need to keep these skilled people, no matter what their background is, they’re a highly skilled workforce.”
The UK and Scottish governments are scrambling to make up for lost time in the Grangemouth transition. Bolstering further education colleges to help bridge the gap in skills is a good step but there is still a risk of the area losing its skilled workforce, uprooting families and dismantling communities in the process.
