An oil storage facility located a quarter-mile (0.4 km) south southeast of the village of Dalmeny towards the west of the City of Edinburgh Council Area, Dalmeny Tank Farm lies to the south of the A90 Trunk Road and immediately to the northeast of the main-line railway linking Edinburgh with Fife. Built by multi-national oil company BP but sold to chemical giant INEOS in 2017, the plant covers approximately 40.4 ha (100 acres) and includes eight immense floating-roof storage tanks with a capacity of 4 million barrels of oil.
The tank farm was constructed in the mid-1970s on the site of an oil-shale mine and refinery, an industry pioneered by James 'Paraffin' Young (1811-83). It is screened from view by a 25-m (82-foot) high grass-covered embankment, the landscaped remains of a shale bing, which is now grazed by sheep.
Crude oil from the North Sea reaches the stabilisation plant at Kinneil via the Forties Pipeline. A proportion is transported by a further underground pipeline (0.76m / 30 inches in diameter and 12 miles / 19 km in length) to Dalmeny before it is exported through the Hound Point Marine Terminal. The oil can either be temporarily stored or immediately transferred via a 1.2-m (46-inch) pipeline and a government-approved metering facility to tankers berthed at Hound Point.
In 1987, a worker was killed while cleaning the inside of an empty tank when vapour was ignited by a cigarette.
