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Defence officials have identified at least a dozen disused oil refineries and chemical plants as possible sites to make explosives and ammunition, including Grangemouth, Southampton and Teesside.
The Ministry of Defence has been scouring Britain for places to build at least six new munitions factories as part of a £6bn programme to increase its supplies as part of a Nato-wide rearmament push.
Emails released to the Ferret website show the MoD, the Department of Business and Trade and the Health and Safety Executive believe that at least four sites at Grangemouth, where the UK’s oldest oil refinery closed earlier this year and several chemical companies have shut down, could be suitable.
Other sites include the proposed BritishVolt battery plant near Newcastle, Milford Haven oil refinery in Wales, Workington and Ulverston in Cumbria, several places on Teesside including Seal Sands, and an oil terminal on Loch Long in Scotland, close to the MoD’s underground bomb store at Glen Douglas, which is said to be the largest in Europe.
The sites were inadvertently revealed when MoD officials failed to properly redact a freedom of information response about Grangemouth, allowing the blacked-out sections to be read. The MoD apologised, admitting it had breached the confidentiality of officials and its business partners.
It said no decisions about sites had been taken, but that it was investing £1.5bn to build a series of “always on” munitions factories, creating about 1,000 jobs and ensuring “defence is an engine for growth”.
The Scottish government said it was “fully committed to playing its full part” in the defence of the UK and its allies, but that “we are not aware of these plans, and Scottish government officials are engaging urgently with the MoD to understand further detail of what is being proposed”.
Under Project Nobel, a programme named after the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, officials have been in talks with three foreign arms companies with existing links to the MoD to build new plants to make trinitrotoluene (TNT), royal demolition explosive (RDX) and nitrocellulose.
One site which was considered but appears to be discarded is the former dynamite factory that Nobel built at Ardeer in Ayrshire in 1871, which employed 13,000 people at its peak but closed in the early 1990s.
Defence officials have been in talks about this “large-scale activity” with investment agencies including Scottish Enterprise, which have been told that former chemical and refinery sites are being prioritised as they are already safety screened and have road, rail and port access along with the necessary utilities.
Scottish Enterprise, an agency of the Scottish government, was told the MoD’s feasibility studies “are being completed by a range of companies; some of which already own an explosively licensed site, which could be expanded to nearby areas and others who would be new to operating within the UK”.
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Officials also noted that recent plant closures at Grangemouth, where hundreds of jobs have been lost recently, meant “this area likely offers a ready workforce”. The Tees Valley area “seems to offer the closest proximity to relevant raw materials”, while the Cumbrian sites appear “to be the most remote and hence may be more favourable regarding quantity distances required”.
The MoD’s investments have already caused significant tensions between the UK and Scottish government, with dockyards in Glasgow and near Edinburgh central to the Royal Navy’s shipbuilding programme.
Ministers in Edinburgh have struggled to reconcile their objections to British companies supplying the Israel Defense Forces with the fact that the same companies are helping the UK’s armed forces to cope with the rising threat from Russia, and demands from Donald Trump that European Nato members increase their defence spending.
In September, the Scottish government warned firms involved in producing arms for the IDF that they would lose public funding, although the same firms supply the MoD and other Nato countries.
