Re: Oil running out!
Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2014 7:13 am
This is old news from 1999 but it shows you have a short memory
The conditions are different now, but the investment in oil in Aberdeen in relative terms was massive at the start of the oil boom and then it went downhill and stagnated for quite a while. Today the threat is from new, cheaper sources of energy, which risk killing off North Sea Oil. Oil companies can make losses too, massive ones indeed. They are in a relatively high risk industry. They can make big profits but sometimes things go against them. If they need to they just walk away from the market, move their gear and the staff they need and leave a ghost town.In the period from 1985 to 1988, when the rest of the country enjoyed the so-called "Lawson boom", the oil industry was in the doldrums and house prices were falling in Aberdeen by 10 per cent a year. "People were so desperate they just handed in their keys at the bank and said, `Do your best,'" Mr Shepherd recalled.
By the early 1990s, however, the Granite City was famed for the number of well-heeled women, the wives of oil workers, to be seen shopping in Calvin Klein on Union Street, or jetting on shopping trips to the big New York department stores. Now, as the future looks rosy for the rest of the UK, a quarter of the area's oil and gas jobs could go in a decade, says the councils' report, leaving just 30,000 employed in the industry compared with 54,000 in 1991.
The prediction follows other indicators of trouble in Aberdeen: the town has Scotland's highest burglary rate, and air passenger numbers have fallen by 9 per cent in the past year, while the rest of Scotland has seen an air- travel boom.
The immediate cause is last year's slump in world oil prices, which also explains the announcement this week by Kvaerner, the engineering giant, to cut 3,000 jobs worldwide in its oil and gas divisions.
More than 2,000 oil jobs have disappeared in Scotland's offshore industry already this year. Marathon Oil cut more than 500 jobs in May while another 100 went from Noble Drilling, and 80 at Amec Process and Energy. However, given that oil prices have recovered from their December low of $10 a barrel, and doubled since the beginning of the year, yesterday's predictions reflect a more fundamental restructuring and scaling down of the industry