First Shipment of US Shale Gas to Arrive in Scotland on Tuesday

EDINBURGH (Sputnik) — The company specially commissioned eight Dragon-class ethane carrier vessels and claims the transatlantic shipments will help it secure 1,400 local jobs for the next 10 to 15 years.

In its background preview to the shipment arrival, the company claimed its new ethane ships “are the largest, most flexible and advanced multi-gas carriers yet to be built.”

The chemicals giant aims to process the imported liquid ethane into ethylene and polyethylene to be used in a variety of industrial uses.

In 2014, when INEOS announced its plans to import US shale gas, the company described the deal as a “huge boost” for the European chemicals industry, but the expected arrival of the first shipment from the United States to Scotland, where it owns one of the United Kingdom’s largest refineries at Grangemouth, has triggered criticism of environmental groups.

"Fracking is a dirty, dangerous process with a disastrous legacy of water, air and environmental pollution. Climate change demands that we rapidly move away from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. INEOS should be working to transform the Grangemouth plant to a low carbon model instead of propping it up with dirty fracked gas from the US," Mary Church, the campaigns manager for the Friends of the Earth international environmental organization, told Sputnik.

INEOS has secured shale gas exploration licenses for 700 square miles of Scotland. The company says it wants to invest 640 million pounds ($910 million) in fracking despite the moratorium implemented by the Scottish government.

A report carried out by the British Geological Survey in 2014 estimated there were 80 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in central Scotland and six billion barrels of shale oil.