When Oil & Gas UK published its latest production forecast last month, chief executive Malcolm Webb appealed for the industry not to be used as “a political football” in the constitutional debate, an echo of my own plea in this column in July.
Our cautions did not meet with much success since the spin-doctors were immediately at it. For some people, the aim of maximising the benefits from the North Sea in terms of prosperity and employment is now secondary to denying reality in order to sustain a political point.
This latest spat occurred just days after the Scottish Government was obliged to correct much-trumpeted figures about the number of jobs to be created by the industry over the next couple of years.
Holyrood had simply taken a UK-wide number from a Lloyds Bank report and presented it as a Scottish one. In football parlance, that deserved at least a yellow card.
But these silly, point-scoring exercises were then put in the sharpest possible perspective by the helicopter crash off Shetland. This was a bleak reminder that the people who work in this industry deserve better than to be treated as bit-players in an ongoing saga of claim and counter-claim based on evidence that cannot be proved one way or another.
Maximising safety in the here and now is a million times more important than making predictions about tax revenues 30 years hence.
Yet it is the latter rather than the former which now dominates political interest in the industry. The careless assumption that it will continue to lay golden eggs reflects insufficient respect for the human effort which makes that outcome possible.
It is not and never has been politicians who produce wealth from the North Sea but the men and women who face the elements, do the job and sometimes pay a very heavy price.
All the statistical manipulation with which we are surrounded takes for granted the technological genius and daily grind of hard, dangerous work without which the industry would not exist.
The figures published by UK Oil & Gas showed an even sharper drop in production than had been forecast . . . 1.2-1.4million barrels oil equivalent per day for 2013, which is 22% down on last year.
In the two preceding years, there were falls of 14% and 19% respectively. This is not good news, insofar as it represents a trend which has been going on since 1999 and has now accelerated. But it is far from terminal.
According to Oil & Gas UK, the really worrying thing is that more of the fall than had been expected is coming from a tumble in production efficiency rates.
The infrastructure is getting older, the shutdowns are becoming more frequent; maintenance requirements are increasing.
On the other hand, there appears to be an investment boom in the offing because there are five large fields among the 15 to be developed.
The headline investment figures will be eye-watering because these are expensive fields to get the oil out of. This should help to sustain employment but the net outcomes in terms of tax revenues once the fields are producing will be correspondingly lower.
I defy anyone to put together that combination of uncertain factors and predict with any confidence what the economic or revenue impacts will be for Scotland or the UK.
Sensible people like Prof Alex Kemp of Aberdeen University do not try. They are happy to describe the input factors with great authority but will commit themselves, very wisely, only to a range of possible outcomes which various models point to from one end of the spectrum to the other.
It is left to politicians alone to make brash boasts about the future, founded on a self-certainty which is born only of ignorance and an imperative to make their own claims stack up.
For everyone else, who does not need to base their facts upon a fixed conclusion, the only certainty is uncertainty.
Probably the most useful political action of recent months was the decision of the Department of Energy and Climate Change in London to set up a working group led by Sir Ian Wood to try to make the best out of this conundrum of falling production and rising investment. That is a practical approach to a practical problem.
In the late 1990s, when the industry faced comparable challenges, Wood chaired PILOT – a joint effort by government and industry – which came up with a range of excellent proposals, most of which were implemented and have stood the test of time.
Without that clear analysis of the steps that were necessary to prolong the life of the North Sea industry at a very difficult time, the story of the past decade would have been very different.
The same thing can happen again. While the North Sea is doubtless very relevant to the constitutional debate – which is why it is being kicked about as a political football – that debate is pretty much irrelevant to the reality of life and prospects on the UK Continental Shelf.
That distinction needs to be better understood.
Maybe it could be impressed upon the politicians who will descend on Aberdeen this week for Offshore Europe.
They should talk about the practicalities of production and how they might be able to help, rather than about fantasy projections or denials of what might or might not happen to North Sea revenues in the future.
Above all, they should show some respect for the industry they are visiting by talking about the safety of working people and how it must be improved, rather than their own pet agendas which are far removed from the worries and challenges of real life and work.
But can they be trusted to do so?
Recommended for you
