Petrochemical giant Ineos is halting manufacturing at its plants that produce acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate in Hull, UK. Ineos mention that these are the last global-scale acetyls plants in Europe, and produce crucial raw materials for a huge variety of industrial applications. The company has blamed the decision on excessive gas prices in the UK, which it says are 12 times higher than in the US and 8 times more costly than coal-based manufacturing in China.
The UK plants will not yet be permanently closed, and could re-open if gas prices fall sufficiently or Ineos can source its own fuel more affordably than UK wholesale costs. About 250 directly delay employed Ineos Acetyls staff at Hull will be retained for now. Ineos claims that its plant are among the most efficient in the world, with the lowest carbon emissions – the company mentions products from its Hull plants have half the carbon footprint of that manufactures in the US, and one 8th that of Chinese manufacturing (it’s not clear whether these figures relate to material from Ineos’s own plants in those regions, or competitors’ manufacturing).
The closure is another certainly serious blow for the UK and European chemicals industry, which has seen multiple plants manufacturing the most basic of chemical building blocks close over the last decade. While for now, it may be possible to replace these supplies with imports, that presents fragility to the supply chains of all of the industries that products support.
Ineos obtained the plants, which are part of the Saltend chemicals cluster on Humberside, from BP in 2021, alongside BP’s aromatics business. The deal included BP’s Cativa XL process for reacting methanol with carbon monoxide to produce acetic acid, which needs less heat and electricity than competing technologies. Ineos now licenses this procedures to other producers worldwide – together with the Eastman Chemical plant in Texas City, US, that Ineos obtained in 2023.
The company’s carbon footprint reduction claims stem from a £30 million investment in 2025, which switched the procedure to run on hydrogen instead of natural gas. Generally, hydrogen is better employed for chemistry than as a fuel. But Ineos has spare hydrogen available onsite, since it generates the carbon dioxide it requires for various processes by converting methane to syngas (a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen). Moreover, since both its feedstock and fuel ultimately come from methane, its costs are robustly rely on natural gas prices.
Ineos’s plants do not longer exist in isolation – they’re part of a chemical cluster in Saltend, which as recognised by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemical Landmarks scheme in 2014, for 100 years of innovation and supplying the United Kingdom with essential base chemicals. As more of the plants within these clusters close down, companies lose efficient interconnections and the shared services they depend on become proportionally more costly, putting further pressure on the sector and creating knock-on effects that could lead to further closures.
