When the oil runs out
Christopher Harvie
Aberdeen: oil capital
Photograph by Islay McLeod
I Meet Mr Blackstuff
‘Tis 35 years since, in the presence (downline) of HM the Queen and Tony Benn, the first official black stuff slurped ashore at Cruden Bay. I had to revisit young Harvie’s ‘Fool’s Gold’ for a commemorative news-piece in BBC Scotland, which turned out to be Citizen Benn and self squeezed into a couple of minutes after HM did the business:
HM: ‘Mr Oil, so good of you to be here to Preserve One’s Way of Life.’
Oil: ‘Charmed to be of assistance, Ma’am.’
But preparing for this episodette gave me time and chance to reassess the history, as we move on to renewables – which have reached roughly the same development stage as the steam engine before James Watt.
I wrote my history in six months study leave in 1993. The time – largely spent in the National Library of Wales which had a full file of the Financial Times’ fortnightly oil supplement – passed in a blur and the book sold well. But the outcome was an anticlimax. Denys Blakeway’s excellent accompanying Channel Four series ‘Wasted Windfall’ was trumped as it neared transmission by a meringue called ‘A Princess in Love’ by Anna Pasternak which romanticised the affair between Princess Diana and Major Hewitt. Mammoth technology and economic botching turned out no match for the delights of royalty unclothed.
Subsequently the official history under Prof Alex Kemp of Aberdeen University has been under way for 16 years. There are reasons for this, as freedom of information has added lots of material, and Kemp’s book will be much better. But such histories ought, like military history, to be policy tools: written to avoid repeating mistakes, and thus to a deadline. Visiting Dusseldorf recently with Holyrood’s economy energy and tourism committee, E.on’s head of renewables asked me to sign his copy of ‘Fool’s Gold’. A year earlier at Holyrood, I found that in an assembly of Scots engineers no-one had heard of it.
The lessons (not all gloomy) are still there, as Andrew Marr and Andy Beckett in their good contemporary histories have (unlike political specialists) used episode and book. ‘Fool’s Gold’ as a title was recently recycled by Gillian Tett in her gripping tale of how investment bankers inflated speculation through the innocent-sounding ‘asset-backed security’ (loosely translated as loaning zillions to Homer Simpson and calling it collateral). Economics of an abstractedly-mathematical sort bore no relation to industry or manufacture, but her social anthropology said much about how young Geeks and Geckos looted savers and would-be houseowners, and ultimately trashed Scottish banking. What might have been the country’s rebirth as Edinburgh finance matched itself to the decarbonisation of our power supplies became an extended autopsy in which the perpetrators – Sir Fred Goodwin, Andy Hornby, Peter Cummings, Lord Stevenson – have excused themselves from any inquiry into the disaster.
II ‘She blew it on the dole!’
Tett was stumped when asked what practical use could be found for a young banker sated with geld. I went back to a favourite of my wife’s, ‘Youth and Art’ by Robert Browning (his mother came from Dundee: not a lot of people know that):
But nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever.
This could but have happened once
And we missed it, lost it forever.
But we have we learned from oil, in ‘positioning’ through satellite, computer and thruster, and the totally new world of underwater electrics. And in the sense that our remaining mechanical engineering – Weir Group, Wood Group, Aggreko – both depends on it and services it. But as the last quarter of the stuff gurgles away we have yet to refine an economic programme that replaces our dependence on a carbon source which produces twice its weight of CO2. You can have all the targets in the world, but never reach them or, worse, fake progress towards them. We have to rationalise our activities to reduce our current toxicity. To adapt Eddie Morgan’s Parliament poem:
A plasma of punters gawping at millionaires in a ball game they can’t play is what we do not want.
A Glasgow crawling with cars farting twice their weight in carbon is what we do not want.
To wear slave-made clothes is not to be free.
The oil boom was a reversal to the grand gestures and loyalties of Victorian Scotland. The projects were huge – a billion for a production platform – and the cast involved (Hammer, Adair, Balogh, Maxwell, Dunnett, Benn, etc.) were larger-than-life, whether heroes or villains. The results were grotesque. Freedom continued for American teenagers to take the Chevvy to the levee, but the dime gallon is now three dollars and in Springfield it hurts.
Then there was our undeserved gift of Mrs Thatcher, rescued in 1974 by Labour buying out the sinking Burmah Oil and saving her Denis. In 1979 with all the black stuff coming in – Chancellor Denis Healey said that whoever was in the right chair when the flow got going was there for a generation – we cocked up devolution and landed her!
Anti-nationalist economists said a Scots petropound would go through the roof and blight exports; nationalist economists said that we could tether this hypothetical currency by investing in England, to mutual benefit. Thatcher’s monetarist spasm and the oil price hike to $30-odd a barrel caused by the first Gulf war swelled sterling to nearly five Deutschmarks and destroyed a fifth of British manufacturing in 1979-81. In the view of Sir Alastair Morton, head of the doomed British National Oil Corporation, ‘Thatcher blew it on the dole!’ Worse was to come with the UK’s flight from industrial reality to the imperial delusion of the Falklands War and the increasingly dark deals of the City. In 1984-86 these gobbled most of what Scots factories remained: merely an hors d’oeuvre, as it turned out.
III The renewable alternative
The Scottish government’s energy efficiency action plan (18 October 2010) is a vade-mecum for a new, austere age: in intentions and targeting essential as a step towards a sustainable society. But its very merits remind you of one saying, beloved of our banker friends: ‘This time it’s different’.
Three sobering factors must be written in: First, major construction projects produce loads of CO2. Second, that we are – despite the world slump – moving steadily toward Peak Oil. The City is dealing with the $100 barrel as fact, not hypothesis; in late 1998 (with UK production peaking) it was only $10 a barrel. Third, climate change is already a fact, as the action plan admits. Expect a wetter, windier Scotland, more flooding and landslides – think the A83 or the Bervie Braes – and their CO2 cost.
Ironically, there are ways in which Scotland can actually benefit from these setbacks, and turn them into part of longer-term global solutions. Advances in turbine design mean we can expand pump-storage – which is now 90% efficient, up from around 58% – to match energy generated offshore to peak demand. The north of Scotland hydro schemes developed by Tom Johnston, 1946-62 – and the reservoirs owned by Scottish Water – can help make Scotland a battery for Europe.
The country’s trading power is also well-placed to tap the ‘North-East Passage’ through the melting Arctic ice sheet: reducing the distance to the Far East by 7,000 km. Korean shipyards are already building ‘Arctic Shuttles’ which can safely and speedily trade through the ice in the months the passage is open. But what happens to cargoes at the European end? European industrial powers like Germany, Belgium, Holland either have densely-trafficked seas or not much sea at all. In Scandinavia, only Norway is well-placed: But our northern islands of Orkney and Shetland and ports such as Scapa Flow and Sullom Voe can be the new break-bulk centres, with hybrid craft going thence into the European river and canal systems.
We have perhaps a quarter of Europe’s usable marine-power resources: power free of CO2. Research on their exploitation is only beginning, and has to be carried out in situ. Our disadvantages are the lack of appropriate authority (the Ofgem issue); the revenue streams impounded in London (the Crown Estate and fossil fuel obligation issues) and the issue of trained labour. In World War I, the Clyde fitter as much as the Scots soldier beat the Kaiser. But after the 1920-21 slump the research- training-investment generator cut out, with lasting effects. Fifty years later, in the 1970s, oil in the hands of Thatcher cast our trained people to the four winds.
Today, with scarcely a fifth of Baden-Wuerttemberg’s trained technicians, proportionate to population, Scotland needs a major, well-funded technical training initiative, a campaign to get our ‘offshored’ workers back, and an open door to expert workers worldwide. We need above all assistance from Europe – from companies like Sweden’s Vattenfall, Germany’s Voith, or Norway’s Statoil.
IV Hell and high water
‘This time it’s different’. Renewable energy inputs have to be supported by carbon reduction measures: passive housing, public transport, less traffic. But we’re worse placed than London, with its elaborate railway network, and closer to poor doomed Springfield. Look at the moving lives of Stirling Council employees in the action plan. 82% go by car to work, 11% walk, 1% cycle. In Copenhagen, three times as many walk or cycle: even our travel patterns in parliament are quite promising. Norman Tebbit the Chingford Skinhead got that much right: ‘On yer bike!’.
We have an economic crisis worsened by the ‘back-of-an-envelope’ schemes of the Westminster ConDems; their brunt is borne by the already poor, and by the regions, as in 1979-81. Can a UK frame (or what looks increasingly like an Anglo-French nuclear alliance) make a renewable evolution take off? Is it even interested?
We need an efficient state-managed gateway – what Gordon Wilson, who managed the SNP’s oil campaign in the early 1970s, has called a ‘Statoil for Renewables’ – and we need it now. Not least because CO2 has its part to play. Donald Bain, Wilson’s associate in 1972-4, pops up in ‘Fool’s Gold’ advocating pumping the stuff back undersea as a means of squeezing out more from the oil-bearing strata, and this technology has been proven on the Norwegian Sleipner field. Germany alone produces 70 million tons of CO2 from its thermal power stations to be stashed away in return for cash: a second case for a Scots-Scandinavian-German low-carbon alliance, set beside Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic’?
Meanwhile, current inundation might threaten at least 100,000 Scots building units, from offshore construction yards to seaside bungalows. An Arctic melt will put up sea levels by five metres: Ayr farewell, Dundee farewell. Stopping disasters may be as important as deploying new marine generators. Flooding cost the UK £2.7 billion in 2007 alone. The tsunami which swept the Indian Ocean in 2005 cost at least 50 times that; and it’s from places like these that much of the West’s fuel and manufacture comes. In Scotland we are evolving, remarkably, the technologies which might cope with it, ahead of other industrial powers. But that’s another story.
Professor Christopher Harvie is SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, a distinguished historian, and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
