To be fair to Sir Ian, there’s still 6 or 7 years left in his prediction that oil supplies will dwindle but it’s not looking good for him as prices surge again toward $100 dollars per barrel and revenues flows into the Treasury.
How much might be left?
There are still substantial known oil and gas reserves in the North Sea left to be exploited. According to a report produced by the Oil and Gas Authority last September, known reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea at the end of 2020 amounted to 4.4 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE).
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/it-s-time-to-kickstart-north-sea-oil
The BBC’s New York Business Reporter is on the story but does not mention Scotland: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63149044
I suppose with oilfield names like ‘Lancaster’ why would she?
BBC Scotland have the above story as Petrol price rise warning after Opec oil output cut and Douglas Fraser is distracted by Navy steps up North Sea energy patrols.
And that revenue flow, big is it:
Total Government revenues from UK Oil and Gas production were £1.4 billion in the tax year 2021 to 2022, compared to £0.3 billion in the previous year, an increase of £1.1 billion
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/government-revenues-from-uk-oil-and-gas-production–2/statistics-of-government-revenues-from-uk-oil-and-gas-production-july-2022
So, a nearly 400% increase? Newsworthy Douglas, at all?
But, but, according to the Scottish Government:
UK North Sea revenue was £1.3 billion in 2017-18, and gradually declined to £0.5 billion in 2020-21, reflecting declines in corporation tax receipts. However, driven by large increases in oil and gas prices, receipts increased by £2.7 billion in 2021-22 to reach £3.2 billion, their highest level since 2013-14
https://www.gov.scot/publications/government-expenditure-revenue-scotland-gers-2021-22/pages/4/#:~:text=UK%20North%20Sea%20revenue%20was,highest%20level%20since%202013%2D14.
Douglas Fraser must know how to explain this, when he gets back.
Talking-up Scotland 
This character should be barred from PUBLIC SPEAKING
He is a TORY agent provocateur
FED ALL RUBBISH ABOUT SCOTLANDS OIL
AND THE TORY PRESS JUST KEEP LYING TO PUBLIC
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Yeah and when Oil does run out in the North Sea we have 100 years of oil in gas in the West Coast of Scotland. What’s stopping us drilling for it ,Trident the Colonial masters dont want the access blocked to the Atlantic for their nuke submarines. They dont want to lose their top seat at the UN.
Dissolve the Union.
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Yes to Dissolving the Union; after all, the Unreal kingdom’s London still has the despicable British Empire Mentality syndrome… After all, Scotland’s people will be healthier and wealthier without hosting USA Weapons of Mass Destruction – As Soon As Possible!
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And this, of course, is one of the reasons why the unionists wish to continue to colonise Scottish territorial waters. Oil and gas, which is mainly in Scottish territorial waters – even after Labour, without discussing it in Parliament, unilaterally changed the sea border – giving England a substantial slice of what was historically Scottish water. The revenues from Scottish waters flow to the Treasury and it is the existence of oil and gas in Scottish waters, plus renewables, that underpins sterling. This is Bodger Broon’s ‘pooling and sharing’ in practice. Scottish energy resources are pooled (pulled??) into UK resources and our share is being told that we are too poor to go it alone.
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The concept of ‘oil running out’ is an elusive one!
– how much money do you want to spend exploring for more oil in new/different areas?
– how much money do you want to spend exploring for more oil in existing oil provinces?
– how much money do you want to spend (how much energy do you want to expend) increasing the ‘recovery factor’ in existing oil fields?
On the latter, the UK Oil & Gas Authority in 2017 published a report entitled ‘Recovery Factor Benchmarking – UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) Oilfields’.
It reported: ‘Expected UKCS recovery factor has consistently been around 42% to 43% which is where the current expected recovery factor stands. Currently, at the end of the basin’s life, it is expected that 57% of the oil originally in those developed fields will remain in the ground.’
Through the application of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods, it notes: ‘Currently the expected RF for the UKCS is 43% and even a small upward percentage swing could add many millions of extra barrels, helping maximise economic recovery.’
So significant but, in the greater scheme of things, relatively marginal gains from EOR. There are limitations due to economics (influenced by e.g. oil prices, operational costs, tax regimes) but also limitations due to ‘physics’ on how much the recovery factor can be increased. And of course there may be/should be limitations imposed on all of the above for environmental/climate reasons.
Some years ago there was programme of research in Scotland to develop an understanding of CO₂-Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) with the aim of creating a commercial use for CO₂ captured from power plants and industry. The project was led by the Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage (SCCS) partnership and funded by the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, 2Co Energy Limited, Nexen and Shell.
Source: https://sccs.org.uk/co2eor-joint-industry-project-20122015?highlight=WyJlb3IiXQ==
It notes that CO₂-EOR technology has been used in North America for decades, involving injecting CO₂ into partially depleted oilfields to force out additional volumes of oil. Crucially, the majority of the injected CO₂ remained permanently stored in the pores of the oil reservoir rocks deep underground.
We learn that: “Although to date there has been no supply of CO₂ to support implementation of industrial scale CO₂-EOR in the North Sea, the large-scale development of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) could change this.”
I have no idea where this research has reached. However, we do know this regarding UK government action: the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy in October 2021 on ‘Track-1 clusters confirmed’.
‘Our cluster sequencing process, which has, through the CCS Infrastructure Fund, £1 billion to provide industry with the certainty required to deploy CCUS (Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage) at pace and at scale, has completed the first phase of the evaluation of the 5 cluster submissions received by the department.
‘We can now confirm that the HyNet and East Coast Clusters have been confirmed as Track-1 clusters for the mid-2020s …..We are also announcing the Scottish Cluster as a reserve cluster if a back-up is needed.’ (These favoured clusters are located in Teesside, the Humber, Merseyside, North Wales.)
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Of course as most of us have always suspected the ‘Once in a life time’ argument against another Independence Referendum is in essence ‘Once when Scotland’s Oil fields ‘ stop giving will then determine when the next Ref is allowed. Then the ‘too poor too small’ argument will arise from the ashes once again.
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The revenue generation in the article is of course nonsense, when being presented with these figures we should always look at and compare the revenue generation of Norway, since production is broadly similar, 2019 saw £17 billion Norway, Scotland £100 million. Ahh but, Norway have a different system, yes but they’re getting the same price for a barrel of oil as we get. So the question is where does the money go.
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