UK business secretary Vince Cable admits the UK needs to change its mindset to ensure its oil and gas industry continues to remain competitive for the next half-century.
And he said oil and gas companies should take lessons from the resurgent UK car industry in order to begin technology collaborations which will extract more resources from the North Sea .
Cable, speaking at an event at Offshore Europe 2013, said that, while compiling a new industrial strategy for the government, it had become clear that ideological attitudes were one of the key problems facing the industry when it came to working closer together.
“The British, frankly, we’ve got into a mindset for the last three decades that firms shouldn’t cooperate, government shouldn’t come anywhere near it,” he said.
“That’s very difficult to understand in Germany, in Norway, or Korea, France or even the US.”
Cable, a former economist with Shell, was speaking at an event on improving energy industry collaboration over technology over the next 50 years.
The panel, which also included BP chief scientist Ellen Williams and Amec group president for Europe John Pearson, pointed to the need to change a mindset which in recent years had avoided technology cooperation to protect intellectual property and designs.
And Cable admitted legal concerns were making it far harder for companies to try and work together.
“In very broad terms we’re dealing with competition, we’re dealing with IP protection and these are barriers – perfectly legitimate barriers,” he said.
“We believe in a competitive system, capitalism and all that. But what we’ve discovered as a result of the work we’ve been doing on industrial strategy goes deeper than that. There’s a fear among companies about being caught up in antitrust if they talk to each other.
“The most successful work we’ve done is with the British car industry, which is booming. It’s at least partly as a result of Nissan, Ford, GLR and the rest of them sitting round a table agreeing what they need to do on technology, on skills and their supply chain.
“They’ve got over that hurdle, where it’s a much earlier stage [here].”
But Cable admitted there were still areas the Government could improve on to help the industry speed up important processes and allow greater long term planning.
“The speed of decision making in the UK isn’t comparable to some of our competitors,” he said.
“That’s partly around planning issues, as we know if you’re in the downstream area, but I think the underlying question is no, we’ve got to do better on both speed and long termism.”
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