Fossil Fuel lobbyists and the far-right have channelled North Sea
discontent into a toxic nostalgia for the good old days. Ewan Gibbs
shows how this cannot hide the inevitable decline of oil and gas

Oil and gas have re-emerged as dominant themes of Scottish political debate on a scale perhaps not seen since the heady days when the SNP contended that ‘it’s Scotland’s oil’ following major offshore petroleum discoveries in the 1970s. The nationalists ran on a poor imitation slogan — ‘It’s Scotland’s Energy’ – at May’s Scottish Parliament election when they topped the poll on a reduced majority. Energy in this context was effectively a stand in for oil and gas.

SNP messaging focused on the demands that the UK government withdraw its objections to future licensing and remove the Energy Profits Levy charged on proceeds from North Sea production. This is remarkable given that these matters are entirely reserved issues and the myriad challenges related to the cost of living and the public sector. Oil has become a convenient rallying point for the SNP as well as for the Tories and Reform. It is a means for the SNP to shift tack having previously supported a pause on licensing, and to do so in such a way which implied ‘standing up for Scotland’ and oil workers against Westminster.

North Sea oil has become centrefold once more in a very different guise to 1970’s projections of wealth and prosperity which were revived in 2014 when a petro-fuelled economic case for independence undergirded the White Paper. Now, the oil and gas industry is presented as a threatened aging sector which nevertheless remains a valuable source of employment in Aberdeen, the North East, the Highlands and the Northern Isles. For Reform and the Tories oil is a culture war weapon brazenly wielded against climate change commitments. Debates over licensing have been framed as a contest between the supposedly luxury beliefs of the urban middle classes on the need to act on climate change against the hardheaded need to preserve jobs and reinforce our energy security.

Reform have quite literally produced memes depicting the plat forms which could produce bountiful riches that red bureaucrats and ‘woke’ eco-activists are preventing us from enjoying. A toxically nostalgic vibes-based argument is the best means to understand the affective but incoherent case for more drilling. It doesn’t stand up to a scant glance at stubborn geological, economic or political realities. North Sea oil and gas production peaked around the turn of the millennium but has fallen to around a quarter of peak levels. Employment has also shot downwards for decades. In each case, the downturn has only accelerated since the price crash of 2014.

When BP announced that they were selling the last of their North Sea assets this summer, it was seized upon by industry lobbyists, opposition politicians and John Swinney to put the boot into the UK government. The argument ran that BP was leaving the North Sea because the profits levy made production unprofitable. It ignored the fact that BP has been slowly exiting the North Sea for the best part of twenty-five years, having sold the giant Forties field to the Houston-based ‘independent’, Apache, in 2003. Since then, BP has divested from the Grangemouth complex, the Forties Pipeline system and given up running the Sullom Voe terminal on Shetland too. Other oil majors have followed a similar trajectory. The decline in North Sea employment continued even when the sec tor became a net fiscal drain on the UK Treasury in the 2010s, long before the profits levy was introduced after the uptick in oil prices following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The debate on future licensing has become a convenient red herring for forces on the right and the business lobby. It appears to present a perfect case of climate ambitions standing between Scot land and the buried treasure lying waiting for us beneath the sea bed. Focusing on the fields we haven’t yet licensed ignores the rate of closure of those that we have. Robert Gordon University’s Energy Transition Institute estimates oil industry job losses could be as high as 400 per fortnight, whilst the NGO Uplift estimated that more than 200,000 industry related jobs were lost in Britain from 2014 to 2024. Even if the major projects currently in contention, Rosebank and Jackdaw, were both licensed, the commensurate impact would be highly limited in the face of these overwhelming trends which would continue unabated.

Swinney and his allies are confronted with the problem of past failure. They endorsed a ‘just transition’ to renewables strategy in the 2010s but the promised well-paid manufacturing jobs in renewables have not materialised in anything like the numbers anticipated. In the meantime, foreseeable closures offshore have been accompanied by visible industrial disasters onshore. Most prolifically, the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery in 2025 which was followed by the partial closure of the Mossmorran petrochemicals complex across the Forth in Fife earlier this year. Like the abandonment of North Sea production platforms, these closures weren’t provoked by the transition to renewables but by the profit margins of multinational owners. Grangemouth’s refinery has been replaced by a fuels import terminal, locking Scotland into the global carbon economy but leaving it with fewer industrial benefits and diminished energy security.

All the evidence on the ground and historical experience points to the need for a planned phaseout of the North Sea oil industry under government leadership but this is not forthcoming from either Edinburgh or London. The current approach is leading to the replication of the disasters visited on industrial regions in the 1980s and 1990s despite the explicit just transition commitment that this would not happen. Grangemouth workers pointedly insisted that they did not want to become the coal miners of the 2020s. Yet the political pivot is in the opposite direction. Embracing the chimera of new oil and gas production will not create jobs but it could mortally delay any attempts to effectively capture advantages from moving towards renewables. This suits the corporate interests who dominate both sectors with relative impunity. We are already witnessing an unfolding economic disaster in areas most dependent on oil and gas marked by growing dole queues and emigration by skilled workers. Failure to act now could lead to an even grimmer future