Scotland’s North Sea oil and gas industry, the ultimate feedstock supplier of the petrochemicals infrastructure in and around Grangemouth, should be shut down to meet international targets for reduction of carbon emission and combat climate change, says a soon-to-be-published scientific report excerpted by the Glasgow newspaper Sunday Herald.

Winding down oil and gas would also mean closing major petrochemical facilities operated by Ineos in Grangemouth and by ExxonMobil and Shell at Mossmorran, as well as the oil and gas terminals in Peterhead, Orkney and Shetland.

Authors of the report commissioned by the environmental groups Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, in conjunction with Friends of the Earth Scotland, are climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the UK’s University of Manchester and Uppsala University in Sweden.

In their view, the Scottish government must toughen pollution reduction targets to “net zero” by 2050. This would mean decarbonizing transport and heating, boosting energy efficiency in buildings, eliminating waste, expanding forests by a third and restoring peat bogs.

Calculating for the first time Scotland’s carbon budget under the Paris international climate agreement of 2015, the experts say that to meet its target, the country can only emit 300 million t more carbon dioxide altogether. This would mean reducing emissions by at least 10% annually, starting immediately. Like the rest of the world, they say the country “must keep 70-80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground.“

The pollution database maintained by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) links 12 of the top 20 carbon polluters, who together emitted 6 million t of CO2 in 2016, to North Sea oil and gas. It identifies four of the most polluting as Ineos, followed by ExxonMobil, Shell and Total.

In place of the petrochemicals infrastructure, one of the report’s authors, Jaise Kuriakose, a climate scientist from the University of Manchester, recommends that Scotland move to a 100% renewable energy economy.

Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoE) has calculated that the Scottish government’s draft climate bill would fail to deliver the pollution cuts needed, as it requires almost no further emissions reductions at any time in the next decade. “Scotland cannot possibly have an oil industry in the long term if we are taking climate change seriously,” the organization contends.

As could be expected, the North Sea offshore fossil fuels industry has little enthusiasm for the proposals. It argues that oil and gas are vital for energy security, while at the same time supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributing billions to the economy.

Ineos has thus far declined comment. However, the olefins and polyolefins giant would undoubtedly oppose it, should it think the plans were likely to be realized. A fierce advocate of fracking and owner of the largest number of shale exploration licenses in the UK, the Swiss-headquartered group is still fighting the Scottish government’s plans to make its shale moratorium permanent. Ineos currently imports US shale-derived ethane to feed its Grangemouth plants.