First shipment of US shale gas arrives in Scotland

The first shipment of US shale gas has arrived from Pennsylvania at Ineos’s Grangemouth plant in Scotland on Tuesday despite rising tensions about fracking.

The UK based chemical company has sailed 27,500 cubic metres of ethane gas to its Grangemouth plant on the Firth of Forth. The Grangemouth ethane tank is the largest in Europe at 44m high.

The gas is produced using the controversial method of fracking, which blasts rock underground. Critics of the process say it causes environmental issues such as pollution of the water table and causing earthquakes.

The shipment arrives less than 24 hours after the Labour party vowed to ban fracking at the party’s annual conference.

The party’s shadow energy minister Barry Gardiner, said: “Fracking locks us into an energy infrastructure that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to clean energy. So today I am announcing that a future Labour government [would] ban fracking.”

The Scottish government also imposed a moratorium on fracking north of the border last year. The Scottish National party is under pressure from some of its members to make the ban permanent.

Billionaire founder of Ineos, Jim Ratcliffe, however believes fracking would be good for the UK economy as supplies from the North Sea are dwindling.

“Shale gas can help stop the decline of British manufacturing and today is a first step in that direction,” said Ratcliffe.

The company said the shipment would secure the future of Grangemouth for the next 15 years. Ineos said the cargo marked the opening of a “virtual pipeline” across the Atlantic connecting the UK market with cheap and plentiful US shale gas.

Despite the collapse in worldwide oil and gas prices over the past two years narrowing the economic advantage of US shale gas, it has remained the cheapest source amongst the North Sea, Russia and the Middle East.

But Ratcliffe believes in the long run the solution would be to open shale resources to fracking in the UK.

Mary Church, head of campaigns for Friends of the Earth Scotland brings the argument back to the moral side of things.

"It is completely unacceptable to attempt to prop up INEOS' petrochemicals plants on the back of human suffering and environmental destruction across the Atlantic.

"The fact that Scottish public money is tied up in this project is disgraceful. Setting aside the devastating local impacts of fracking, the climate consequences of extracting yet more fossil fuels are utterly disastrous.

"If Jim Ratcliffe was really concerned about the future of the Grangemouth plant and its workers, he would be planning for its transition to a low-carbon model."