to form the PetroIneos company. Grangemouth Refinery today employs around 650 people over a 700 hectare site. Scenes from the 2013 film World War Z featuring Brad Pitt were filmed near the facility. In November 2020, the business announced the ”mothballing” of the oldest of the three Crude Oil Distillation Units, and its Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit, both of which had been shut down since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This would also be accompanied by the loss of up to 200 jobs, or around 1/3 of the permanent workforce. The business blamed this restructuring on the reduction in demand for road and jet fuels, a direct result of the pandemic, combined with a gradual long-term increase in the electrification of road vehicles, and a decreased reliance on fossil fuels. This would reduce the total Refinery throughput from 210,000 to 150,000 barrels per stream day. Operation The Grangemouth Refinery is a major landmark, with its numerous gas flares and cooling towers visible across a wide area of the Scottish Lowlands. The refinery has a 'nameplate' capacity for processing of crude oil daily. It currently employs about 450 permanent staff, and a further 350 contractors. It processed approximately 400,000 tonnes of imported crude oil annually until the end of the Second World War, and subsequent expansion programmes have increased refining capacity to an excess of 10 million tonnes per year. The INEOS-owned North Sea Forties pipeline system terminates at the Kinneil processing facility, and surplus crude is exported via pipeline to the Dalmeny tank farm, and subsequently shipped out from the Hound Point marine terminal onto oil tankers of up to 350,000 D.W.T. which are able to navigate the shallow water of the Forth. Annual output share Petrol - 22% Diesel - 24% Kerosene & Jet fuel - 13% Gas oil - 8% Fuel oil - 15% LPG/petrochemical feedstocks - 12% Fuel gas/other - 6% Waste - 1% Safety record One of the refinery's biggest accidents happened at 7am on Sunday 22 March 1987 when the HydroCracker Unit exploded. The resulting vibrations and noise could be heard up to 30 km away. The resulting fire burned for most of the day. One worker was killed. Just 9 days earlier on 13 March, another incident occurred involving the refinery flare line, the resulting fireball killed two workers. In 2002, BP the previous owners of the plant, were fined £1m for breaching