IN Scotland, the last shale mine closed in 1962, bringing to an end a local culture and way of life and leaving West Lothian mining villages without the mines to employ them, with only the massive red bings as souvenirs. They are heaps of brick-red soil containing the mineral waste from the shale mining and distillation process that took place here.

On a drive over to Edinburgh, I asked my engineer husband about the 30 to 90 metre-high bings, as we neared the city. He said they were the result of the first chemical engineer James “Paraffin” Young. For around six decades from the 1860s, Scotland was the world’s leading oil producer, thanks to an innovative new method of distillation which transformed oil shale into fuel.

Young was an entrepreneur, inventor, chemist and engineer.

Young studied chemistry at Anderson’s College in Glasgow and later he became the father of the petrochemical industry. Scotland became the first and largest producer of refined oil in the world! Young’s major discovery occurred in 1848 while working in the mining industry. He noticed that oil was leaking from the ceiling of a coal mine. He deduced from this that there must be a way of intentionally extracting oil from coal if you heated it. Young patented this method in 1850 with his partners, Edward Binney and Edward Meldrum. They then set up the world’s first refinery at Bathgate.

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This enterprise used Young’s technique of distilling oil from the locally mined shale or torbanite (known as boghead coal, bog coal or cannel coal). From these, he managed to extract oil and instil it into paraffin, amongst other useful chemicals.

Then with a new plant at Addiewell, the company became a worldwide success, selling oil and paraffin lamps as far afield as America. This initial success began an industry that managed to mine around 30 million tons of shale from the bowels of West Lothian for the following 50 years and turn it into oil. The company pioneered the use of shale oil, and employed 4000 people. Later, Young’s company, founded in 1866, was absorbed into the petrochemical giant BP. His innovation and entrepreneurship remain a lasting legacy, not only in Scotland where the landscape is literally etched with his chemical processes, but over the entire world.

These bings stand in monument to those years, when 120 works belched and roared, wrestling 600,000 barrels of oil a year from the ground in what had been an agricultural region. The process was costly. To extract the oil, the shale had to be superheated. And it produced huge quantities of waste – for every 10 barrels of oil, six tonnes of spent shale would be produced. In total, that was 200m tonnes of the stuff – and it had to go somewhere. Hence these enormous slag heaps. Twenty-seven of them in all, of which 19 survive.

What of the bings today? They have become hotspots of wildlife – with 350 plants species, including moss and lichen; a diverse array of orchids, and of hares and badgers, red grouse, skylarks, ringlet butterflies and elephant hawkmoths, 10-spotted ladybirds. As writes Cal Flyn in his Guardian article “West Lothian’s sleeping giants: wastelands that shivered into life”: “Over the space of a half-century, these once-bare wastelands had somehow, magically, shivered into life ... Eliot’s Waste Land drew from the ‘perilous forest’ of Celtic mythology, a land ‘barren beyond description’ through which a hero must pass to find the Otherworld, or the holy grail.

“The bings, too, already offer a glimpse of what we might find on the other side – recuperation, reclamation. A self-willed ecosystem is in the process of building new life, of pulling itself bodily from the wreckage. In starting again from scratch, and creating something beautiful.”

Impossible not to think of TS Eliot: “breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.”

It’s all rather a sad reflection, then, that under the new Labour Government, Scotland, the first-ever producer and refiner of oil, will become the first refiner and producer of oil to lose its refinery at Grangemouth, and the North East may start closing down. There will be 400 highly skilled jobs lost. Scotland will lose these skills elsewhere as the renewables industry will require far fewer workers – that’s a fact, not the fantasy put out by the media and politicians.

(Image: Jane Barlow/PA)

Scotland will then need to import costly and less green refined oil from elsewhere with tankers in the Firth of Forth. Yet more plans to hold Scotland back, as seen in the past decades with the closure of shipbuilding, steel and other industries in order to weaken Scotland’s economy and make us dependent. A thriving economy needs to be based on industry and manufacturing – not the property market in London! Scots voted no 10 years ago, and we’ve been paying the price for that betrayal ever since. I figure most Unionists just get very angry because they are aware their arguments rest on quicksand.

The Grangemouth refinery closure will profoundly affect the whole area there, with skilled workers moving abroad and affecting the supply chains. We may need now a just transition, but is Scotland leading the way too soon? It can’t be a cliff edge because we need oil and gas for decades to come – what about petrochemicals that are used in medicine, dyes, paint, clothes, supplies for industry and more? Alternatives must be found urgently, and until then, we will require oil and gas.

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Refined oil will have to come from the Netherlands. In fact, the UK Government gave Petroineos several hundred million for a petrochemical plant there. So I assume they’d rather support the Netherlands than Scotland?! Politicians speak of £100 million to support Falkirk, or the few dozen renewable jobs required. There could easily be shortages that will affect Scotland first, so how will this impact Scotland’s energy security? The plan is for Grangemouth to import petrol, diesel and kerosene.

The first article I found on James Young thought it was “unbelievable” that Scotland produced such innovators! But really why not Scotland?! There is so much ignorance of the outstanding contributions Scotland has made to the world! Especially here in Scotland itself. We crucially need more positive articles on Scotland’s great innovations and businesses, that offer hope and opportunities for a better way forward. Not more of the same old procrastinations or inward-looking ideas. We need new ways forward to believe in Scotland.

P Keightley

Glasgow