Plans to haul fuel by road from locations in England and Wales to Scotland will be put in place today ahead of a two-day strike at Grangemouth, Scotland's biggest oil refinery.

A strike by 1,200 workers at the refinery looks certain to go ahead on Sunday and Monday after negotiations between union officials and company executives collapsed last night.

Grangemouth has been in the process of shutting down since the weekend ,and the company said that it now had no option but to shut down the refinery completely for safety reasons.

It will take up to a month to bring the refinery back up to full capacity, according to its owners.

Contingency plans are being prepared by BP, which operates a fuel distribution terminal at Grangemouth, and the Government to try to minimise disruption to fuel supplies in Scotland and the North of England.

The Scottish government warned drivers today not to panic-buy petrol and said that there were sufficient emergency reserves in refineries and reservoirs around the country to last well into May.

John Swinney, the Scottish Finance Minister, is expected to outline the contingency measures in the Scottish Parliament today.

“We have ample supplies of petrol and diesel within the system well into the month of May — providing purchasing behaviour by members of the public remains the same, “ Mr Swinney said.

“We also have the ability to import fuel, if we need to support the stocks we already have in Scotland.“

Officials from Unite, the trade union, have been meeting with management from Ineos, which owns Grangemouth, at Acas, the conciliation service, for the past two days.

However, talks broke down last night and the union announced that it had failed to find a breakthrough in a dispute over pensions.

Ineos claimed this morning that it had taken pension proposals off the table and was prepared to spend three months discussing a resolution with the union and the help of pensions experts.

Tom Crotty, chief executive of Ineos Olefins, said: "We have done everything we can to help resolve this dispute. The plain fact is that the union seeems hell bent on pursuing a strike that will cause chaos and disruption for the people of Scotland and across the UK."

The AA, Britain’s largest motoring organisation, said that motorists should not panic unnecessarily.

Paul Watters, the AA’s head of public affairs, said: “I think motorists in Scotland are going to be wondering what on earth is going to happen, but there still is no reason for people to panic.“

As well as the distribution terminal, BP operates the Forties pipeline that delivers crude oil from the North Sea to the Grangemouth refinery.

The pipeline, which is running at between 650,000 and 700,000 barrels a day, supplies 30 per cent of UK’s crude oil demand.

There was growing concern among British gas traders that a Forties shutdown could have a knock-on effect on gas supplies from the North Sea.

The St Fergus gas terminal, which supplies about a third of the Britain's gas, feeds some hydrocarbon liquids extracted from the natural gas into the Forties pipeline system.

ConocoPhillips said that gas production at its Britannia field would have to stop if the Forties system, into which Britannia feeds crude, were shut down.

Some Scottish transport companies have already been forced to buy bulk fuel supplies from Hull rather than Grangemouth, while individual hauliers apparently had been refused permission to fill up at a succession of stations in the M6/M74 corridor.

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