In 1865 James Young, from Bathgate, set up Young Paraffin Light and Mineral Oil Co. On a drive over to Edinburgh I asked my engineer husband about the 30 to 90 metres high Bings, as we near the city. He replied, they were the result of the first Chemical engineer James Paraffin Young. They are heaps of red soil containing the mineral waste from the shale mining and distillation process that took place here.
James ‘Paraffin’ Young There was a time when Scotland was the first and largest producer of refined oil in the entire world, because of one man – James ‘Paraffin’ Young. Young was an entrepreneur, inventor, chemist and engineer. His major discovery occurred in 1848, while working in the mining industry. He noticed that oil was leaking from the ceiling of a coal mine. He deduced from this that there must be a way of intentionally extracting oil from coal if you heated it. Young patented this method1850 with his partners, Edward Binney and Edward Meldrum. They then set up the world’s first Refinery at Bathgate.
This enterprise used Young’s technique of distilling oil from the locally mined shale or Torbanite (known as bog head coal, bog coal or cannel coal). From these he managed to extract oil and instil it into paraffin, amongst other useful chemicals.
Then, with a new plant at Addiewell he became the father of the industry. The company was a world-wide success, selling oil and paraffin lamps as far afield as America. This initial proliferation and success begat an industry that managed to mine around 30 million tons of shale from the bowels of West Lothian for the following 50 years and turn it into oil!
His company pioneered the use of shale oil, and employed 4,000 people. Young’s company founded 1866, was absorbed into the petrochemical giant BP. His innovation and entrepreneurship remain a lasting legacy, not only in Scotland where the landscape is literally etched with his chemical processes, but over the entire world.
Young studied Chemistry at Anderson’s College in Glasgow. This decision would somehow lead to Young becoming the father of the petrochemical industry little more than a decade later. For around six decades from the 1860s, Scotland was the world’s leading oil producer.
The Bings have today become hotspots of wildlife – with 350 plants species, including moss and lichen; diverse array of orchids; and of hares and badgers, red grouse, skylarks, ringlet butterflies and elephant hawkmoths, 10-spotted ladybirds.
Cal Flyn writes in his Guardian article - “Over the space of a half-century, these once-bare wastelands had somehow, magically, shivered into life….Eliot’s Waste Land drew from the “perilous forest” of Celtic mythology, a land “barren beyond description” through which a hero must pass to find the Otherworld, or the holy grail. The bings, too, already offer a glimpse of what we might find on the other side: recuperation, reclamation. A self-willed ecosystem is in the process of building new life, of pulling itself bodily from the wreckage. In starting again from scratch, and creating something beautiful.” https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/mar/16/west-lothian-scotland-spoil-heap-wastelands-shivered-into-life
Impossible not to think of TS Eliot:
breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
II Its all rather a sad reflection then, that under the new Labour government, Scotland may become the first oil producer to loose its refinery at Grangemouth and the north east may start closing down. The first article I found on James Young, thought it was unbelievable that Scotland produced such innovators! But really – why not Scotland?!
Scotland will then need to import costly and less green refined oil from elsewhere. Yet more plans to hold Scotland back, as seen in the past decades with the closure of shipbuilding, steel, and other industries in order to weaken Scotland’s economy and make us dependent. A thriving economy needs to be based on industry and manufacturing – and not the property market in London!
