Scottish oil
The view from Aberdeen
Skinflint
I have always tried to resist cliché in this column, but every one of those old saws about the old being in the midst of the new came immediately into my mind when, with my colleague Patrick Cosgrave, I visited Aberdeen, the new oil capital of the north. The old Aberdeen harbour is crowded with the detritus of rig supply ships, scruffy trawlers, machinery for repair, and all the foul stuff that goes with the exploitation of the black gold of the North Sea; and the old fish market has been knocked down to make room for new oil company offices. But it wasn't any of these things that brought the cliche to mind: it was, rather, the rescue of a roe deer from the water off Albert Quay at 6 a.m. on Thursday morning last by two men from the Shell BP depot. I should explain that at this time of the year the deer have usually departed for very much higher ground, where food is plentiful and human beings few, so the presence of one of these beautiful but intensely shy animals at all, let alone in the dreadful chaos of dockland, was something of a surprise, to native as well as foreigner. The oilmen took the curious and adventurous creature back to Grandholm Woods where it was released, perhaps to tell its fellows, hunted every year by the gunmen of the sporting set, that the polluters by oil were not such bad chaps after all.
Talking about pollution, it is remarkable how massive — if late — is the effort of the oil companies to come to terms with the criticisms of the local inhabitants. Such pollution as there is is by no means solely, or even largely, due to oil itself. For example a huge oil depot is planned for Scapa Flow. There is no doubt that the tanks for storage can be kept perfectly clean, and that the transfer of oil to them from the rig sites can be made with a minimum of spillage. The difficulty arises with the tankers who come to pick up the oil. They must travel in ballast and their ballast is water. What, then, will be the effects of the discharge of thousands of tons of ballast water into the Flow? This is the subject of an investigation by a special unit at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. (Heriot-Watt is rapidly becoming the centre of academic expertise on the whole subject of oil and its spin-off problems in Scotland.) A more traditional paution problem has arisen in connection with the proposal of the companies to build a dry dock in the naturally admirable rock cleft at Drumbuie, in the Crowlin islands, off the Ross-shire coast. The advantages of the site from a commercial point of view are enormous, and a village could be built on the island and maintained entirely from the sea, thus obviating the need for much contact between the natives and the invaders. There are, understandably, still a great many reservations on the part of the local Scots, who complain about the likely noise effect of building, and other potential hazards. Myself, I concluded — in advance of the Edinburgh inquiry looking into the matter — that, given that Scotland wants the oil, given tha't Scotland don't simply want the oil-men to go away so that they can return to pastoral peace and simplicity, then the Crowlin site is ideal.
Mind you, Aberdonians, it seems to me, were much less disturbed about the oil invasion than I had been led to expect. True, there are some very serious problems: massive office development at the expense of local housing and in competition with local builders is one, and the local authority seems to have far less of a grip on the situation in the interests of local people than it should. But, offices apart, there was much less impact than I had expected to see on the physical constitution of the city itself — apart from the harbour area which I have already mentioned. One evening I took a pleasant drive out from the city and around the coast, describing a great semi-circle before reaching dockland, and then passing on to the late mediaeval grandeur of St Machar's Cathedral and King's College. The peace of the coast and beaches was perfect — the Tigs, more than a hundred miles out to sea, being invisible. There can hardly be any question that, for all that some damage has already been done, Aberdeen is still reclaiming from the depredations that have already been suffered or which may be suffered.
And there is undoubtedly the major question of the available wealth. Everybody I spoke to who was qualified on the subject — and, so far as I could judge, they were representative of the most expert opinion — had concluded that the reserves of oil beneath the North Sea were far in excess of the most ludicrously optimistic reports to date. Visiting the massive offshore rigs — terrifying to approach, Gothic in their spidery mass as the flat-bottomed, low in • the water, supply ships departed them — one could not doubt the supreme confidence of the skilled and hardened technicians on board, men who had explored for and found oil the world over, that they were on to one of the best things in their professional lives.
The Americans among them, of course, are not greatly bothered whether extraction is quick or slow, and would certainly prefer it if the British did not grasp quite how much money was forthcoming, since their experience is that such awareness merely leads to more pressure on the companies from native governments. The British, however, were anxious for the quickest and earliest realisation on the part of the politicians of just how much was involved, so that appropriate steps could be taken to use the wealth in the national interest. Having technical conversations on this kind of subject on a rig is, I assure you, a somewhat eerie experience — nothing in the BBC's Mogul had prepared me for it — but, once on a rig, one realises how stable and powerful they are as structures, and how safe, short of really foul weather, the workers are.
The distinction between British and Americans made ,above is a very important one. Alone among oil producing countries we do not make stipulations about the number or percentage of natives to be employed at home by the oil companies. Thus the companies — like Napoleon, who preferred to use Spanish troops on his Russian front, and vice versa — try to keep their British and Scots in the Far East, and import Malays and Chinese to Aberdeen — the whole being presided over, of course, by a hard core of Americans. This practice must be brought to an end: the last Tory government was shamefully neglectful in the matter, and there are few signs that Labour will be any better. Yet, the forcible exile of our own skilled natives is one of the reasons why the conviction has grown that we do not have the skills and the to exploit the North rselves, and why we technologyea u
therefore hestitate in so pusillanimous a Manner before spitting in the collective eye of the companies.
Again, I am no expert in these matters, but I quote the opinions of the British oilmen to whom I talked: we have the skills, we can easily acquire the remaining technology, and the companies will take any amount of punishment before pulling away from the North Sea. This may imply a frightfully unsporting and un-Bri
Spectator June 8, 1974 tish attitude to the chaps el° have done most of the preliminarY organisation and exploration, but they are not themselves frightfullY British or frightfully sporting, and rough treatment is not only need. ed to keep them in order, but is good business as well. There has, of course, been a marked increase in Scottish property values, even independent of the oil business. One friend of mine in Galloway, who runs a long-standing haulier business but who has also, for some years, rented a small (sixty-four acre) farm found, two years ago, that his landlord had a cash flow problem (the landlord was a Newcastle man) and bought the farm for £5,000. This year he sold a small cottage on the land for exactly the same sum, observing ftohratnhoethhinagd. thus acquired his far" That anecdote, added to the, likely effect on the Scots awareness of their own wealth brought about by the oil chs" coveries, suggested to me that the generalisations of Dr Johnson (I swl ahnodsse I Jhoauvrenheeyentoret-hreeadWinegs)tearrne now out of date. Johnson, Y1 may remember, observed that know not whether it be peculiar to the Scots to have attained the liberal without the manual arts, have excelled in ornament" knowledge, and to have wanted not only the elegancies but the conveniences of commond life ... men thus ingenious an inquisitive were content to live In total ignorance of the tradesbY which human wants are supPhed; and to supply them by the grosses' means." But, "Since they have known that their condition NO.! capable of improvement, then progress in useful knowledge hes, been rapid and uniform. Whli remains to be done they Sti quickly do, and then wonder, li"" me, why that which was se dneelcaeysesda."ry and so easy was so long e There is a moral here: if th Westminster politicians are sloWer than the Scots themselves to grasn what is going on in the North S' and to take steps to control, 1' ;hen the Scots will do the .10': 'themselves, with woeful c°nr sequences for the Union, and f? England's chances of sharing le Scottish oil.
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