Alternatives to closure of Grangemouth refinery: EIR release

Information requested

Any final ministerial briefing, summary, or options paper prepared between 1 September 2023 and 30 April 2024 that sets out alternatives to closure of the Grangemouth refinery.

This may include (but is not limited to) options such as: public ownership, worker-led buyout, state partnership, or transition to biofuels/green refining.

Please limit to no more than three documents, and exclude working drafts or purely internal emails.

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption,
because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because exception(s) under:

• Regulation 10(4)(e) (internal communications);
• Regulations 10(5)(e) (substantial prejudice to confidentiality of commercial or industrial information), and;
• Regulation 11(2) (personal data of a third party)

of the EIRs applies to that information. The reasons why these exception(s) apply are explained in the Annex to this letter.

I would also like to notify you that the enclosed response also covers request to the Just Transition Commission (Reference number 202500478095), as both requests are identical and would have been dealt with by the same team within Scottish Government.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR 202500478002 - Information Released - Annex A and B

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