New Statesman Scotland
It seems a long time since anyone worked up a head of steam about North Sea oil. Which, in a way, is odd. Not only is it one of Scotland's great assets, but it could be (and has been) argued that it was the advent of offshore oil in the 1970s that kick-started the modern home rule movement and, eventually, produced the Edinburgh parliament. But it looks as if North Sea oil will be climbing back on to the political agenda - but as a problem. Barmac Construction - which runs the big platform-building yards at Nigg Bay and Ardersier on the Moray Firth - says that it is almost out of work, that there are no new orders on the horizon and that by the spring of next year its workforce will be shrunk from the current 3,400 to 100. Bad news for the new millennium.
The trade unions are already agitated. No doubt local authorities on both sides of the Moray Firth are already setting up their respective "task forces" and briefing their MSPs for the battle to come. But North Sea oil is one of those (many) subjects that the Scotland Act of 1998 puts beyond the clutches of the parliament. All the MSPs will be able to do is fume as their constituents head for the dole.
Still on the politics of oil, remember the Brent Spar row? Remember Shell's plans to tow that huge concrete structure out into the deep Atlantic and drop it to the bottom of the ocean? Remember how the plan was scuppered by Greenpeace, which later had to concede that the sums on which its objections were based were flawed? And how Shell was so red-faced about the whole business that it caved in and hauled the device up to a Norwegian fjord, where it is now being taken apart at enormous expense?
That whole extraordinary affair - which saw the suits of Big Oil being outmanoeuvred by men with beards - has been written about by two Aberdeen University academics, Tony Rice and Paula Owen. Their book comes to a fascinating conclusion: economically, technically and environmentally, Shell (and Her Majesty's Government) was right; politically and media-wise it was almost risibly inept. As a result, deep-sea decommissioning is now a dead duck. Which is not only a blow to the industry, but an even bigger blow to those comrades who still believe in the omniscience (albeit wicked) of Big Oil and its lackeys in Big Government.
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