Ineos, the chemicals company owned by the billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is to cut a fifth of jobs at its East Yorkshire plant, blaming “sky high” energy costs and “dirt-cheap” imports from China.
The company founded in 1998 by Ratcliffe, who co-owns Manchester United FC, said it would cut 60 jobs at the Acetyls site in Hull, which makes petrochemical products such as acetic acid. It said more roles would be at risk across the industry unless the government stepped in.
Ineos said “dirt-cheap carbon-heavy” imports from China were “flooding the market” in Britain and the rest of Europe, after they were deterred from entering the US because of Donald Trump’s tariffs, and called on the UK government and European Commission to launch their own border levies.
It claimed that many Chinese competitor products made using coal emitted up to eight times more CO2 than Ineos’s UK operations, saying that “more sites will close and thousands more jobs will be lost” across the chemicals sector if “the UK government and European Commission do not support tariffs to protect its industry”.
In June, the London-based petrochemicals company closed its Grangemouth plant, Britain’s oldest oil refinery, on the Firth of Forth with the loss of 400 jobs.
David Brooks, the chief executive of Ineos Acetyls, said: “This is a very difficult time for everyone at the Hull facility. We have a leading-edge, efficient and well-invested site and the team here is highly skilled, professional and dedicated.
“Making the decision to cut 60 roles was not taken lightly. We have explored every possible alternative but in the face of sustained pressure from energy costs, combined with unfairly low-cost imports into the UK and Europe, we’ve been left with no other choice. Our priority now is to support those affected and protect the long-term future of the site.”
The Hull announcement comes a day after Ineos shut two plants in Rheinberg in Germany with the loss of 175 jobs.
Ineos recently invested £30m at the Hull site to switch from natural gas to hydrogen, cutting emissions by 75%, it said. The site is Europe’s largest producer of acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate, which are used in many everyday products, from pharmaceuticals such as aspirin and paracetamol to food preservatives, plastics, diagnostic tests, glues, nail polish, perfumes and industrial coatings.
Brooks said: “This is a textbook case of the UK and Europe sleepwalking into deindustrialisation. Ineos has invested heavily at Hull to cut CO₂, yet we’re being undercut by China and the US while left wide open by a complete absence of tariff protection. If governments don’t act now on energy, carbon and trade, we will keep losing factories, skills and jobs. And once these plants shut, they never come back.”
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Ineos is also facing difficulties at its loss-making automotive division, which hopes to move production of its Grenadier off-roader vehicle from France to the US to avoid Donald Trump’s 15% tariffs on European car imports. The division’s boss, Lynn Calder, told the Financial Times at the weekend that it aimed to start producing the 4×4 vehicle in America “as quickly as possible”.
Separately on Tuesday, energy group Shell said it expected a $600m (£447m) hit in the third quarter from ditching its biofuels project in Rotterdam, while predicting higher liquefied natural gas production and better gas trading results.
The oil company paused construction at the Rotterdam site last summer due to technical problems, and axed it altogether last month, arguing that it would be “insufficiently competitive”. It would have been one of the biggest converters of waste into green jet fuel in Europe.
