Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos has begun mothballing its three acetyls plants at Saltend Chemicals Park in Hull, northern England, saying UK gas prices have made Europe’s last world-scale units of their kind impossible to run.
The chemicals group announced the decision on September 22. Two plants have already stopped. The third is due to go offline within days.
The halt is “until further notice”, not a declared closure. No redundancies have been announced.
The 245 people employed directly at the site will stay on while the units are idled, according to the company.
Ineos said almost 4,000 jobs in the Humberside supply chain hang on the plants if the pause becomes permanent.
The three units make acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate, feedstock for medicines including aspirin and paracetamol, paints, glues, packaging, textiles, detergents, food preservation and military explosives.
Gas is both fuel and raw material.
Ratcliffe said wholesale gas in Britain was now 12 times the level in the US and eight times the cost of coal-based Chinese production.
Reuters put the UK front-month contract near $23.51 (€20.37) per million British thermal units against $2.84 (€2.46) in the US.
Prices have almost doubled since July after disruption linked to war in the Middle East. European manufacturers have struggled to compete with US and Chinese rivals since the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the news agency noted.
“We just cannot compete,” Ratcliffe said. He called government energy policy “economic vandalism on an industrial scale”.
He also took aim at carbon pricing, saying European regulators needed to “wake up” to the combined burden of high energy costs and “unsustainable carbon taxes”. The UK Emissions Trading Scheme is priced at £57-59 (€67-69) per tonne of CO2, according to trade publication gasworld.
Ineos said repeated investment has left the Hull plants among the most efficient in the world, with a carbon footprint half that of US rivals and one eighth of Chinese coal-based output.
Replacement imports, it argued, would therefore raise global emissions even as local production stops.
The company wants the UK Government to work with the European Commission on anti-dumping measures against below-cost US and Chinese chemicals. The EU takes most of the product.
Other European acetyls plants have already shut. Hull was the last of that scale.
The decision sits in a longer squeeze. Ineos cut about 60 jobs at the same site in 2025, blaming energy costs and what it called “dumping” by importers. It also closed its Grangemouth ethanol plant in Scotland that year.
German units have gone the same way.
The Vivergo bioethanol works next door at Saltend closed after the UK-US trade deal cut tariffs on US ethanol imports. Some 160 staff lost their jobs. Across the Humber estuary, the Prax Lindsey oil refinery also shut in 2025.
Ratcliffe has been tax resident in Monaco since 2020 and co-owns Manchester United. Labour politicians have said this should be taken into account when he criticises industrial policy.
Labour Party chair Bridget Phillipson said on September 20 that Ratcliffe loses “the moral high ground” by making statements about the UK while living in tax exile.
He has also been highly critical of the UK’s migration policies. He told the BBC he had lost confidence in the country because of a combination of high taxes and high immigration.
A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson told the BBC: “While this is a commercial decision from Ineos, we know this will be a concerning time for workers in Saltend and their families.
“We’ve taken bold action to support our chemicals industry including £350 million (€409 million) for strategically important chemicals producers, which will be available on a co-investment basis.
“We’ve also put trade measures in place on foreign chemicals imports and are tackling high electricity costs via our Supercharger and British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme to keep our chemicals sector competitive.”
Jim Ratcliffe, the owner of UK multinational chemicals and energy giant INEOS, has warned that half of the industry located in Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest port, could be gone in the next 10 years. https://t.co/JuXByhx2Ey
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) June 11, 2025
