British Author of book on dominance of carbon fuel decries British oil decline

Peter Odell
Saturday August 21, 2004
The Guardian

It is paradoxical that Gordon Brown chooses to castigate Opec’s members for failing to produce enough oil to bring prices down while ignoring Britain’s role as one of the world’s top 10 oil and gas producing countries. He also fails to recognise that declining UK oil and gas output results from a less than proactive government policy for the country’s hydrocarbons industry.

Initially, this arose from the government’s ideological unwillingness to make public investments in oil and gas exploration and production. More recently, it has reflected the government’s obsession with a perceived need to constrain carbon fuel use and to stimulate green energy production with generous subsidies.

Last year’s energy white paper epitomised the government’s anti-oil and gas attitudes. It devoted 60 lines to the UK’s world-scale upstream hydrocarbons industry from a total of 5,000. Since 1974, it produced some 4,500m tonnes of oil equivalent, equating to more than 75% of the UK’s total energy use in this period.

Apart from the 30 years of security of energy supply which domestic production has given, the impact on GDP, on industrial investments, on direct and indirect employment and – most of all – on its balance of trade has been formidable. Net export earnings from domestic oil and gas since 1998 have contributed almost