Ineos mothballs three Hull plants, 245 jobs affected
The chemicals group says UK gas costs 12 times the US price have made its acetyls plants uncompetitive. Two have already stopped producing.
Ineos is mothballing three acetyls plants in Hull. The company says a UK gas price now 12 times the level in the United States has made them impossible to run competitively.
Two of the plants have already ceased production. The third was due to come offline within days, according to the company, and all three will stay mothballed until further notice.
The sites directly employ 245 people. Ineos says they support almost 4,000 further jobs across the Humberside supply chain.
No timescale has been set for permanent closure. The plants have been upgraded in recent years.
Acetyls are feedstock chemicals. They go into pharmaceuticals, food products and military explosives.
The economics turn on gas twice over. The plants use gas as a raw material and also burn hydrogen derived from gas to power production.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who chairs the group, says making acetyls from gas in Britain is now eight times more expensive than making them from coal in China. He puts the Chinese coal process at eight times the pollution.
This is not the first cut at the site. Sixty jobs went at Hull last year, which Ineos blamed on energy costs and on cheap imports being dumped into UK and European markets, as reported at the time by S&P Global Commodity Insights.
The group wants gas prices brought down and wants the UK government to work with the European Commission on anti-dumping measures against below-cost US and Chinese product, a spokesman said.
The wider group has been retrenching for two years. Ineos closed its synthetic ethanol plant at Grangemouth in January 2025 with 80 direct job losses, introduced a hiring freeze and cut discretionary spending in October 2025, and in March this year reported a $593m loss, suspended its dividend for a second year and disclosed net debt of €11.7bn.
For a founder running anything physical in the UK — a brewery, a foundry, a small chemicals or food plant — the lesson is that energy is not a line item that can be absorbed. Ineos has scale, recent capital investment and lobbying reach, and still concluded the sums did not work.
The practical question is how much of your unit cost is gas or gas-priced electricity, and what a competitor importing from the US or China pays instead. That gap, not your margin, is what decides whether the plant stays on.
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