Meeting of the Parliament 07 May 2014
I welcome the debate that the Green Party has initiated today on energy and climate change. It provides an opportunity for us to consider the range of measures that the Scottish Government is taking to develop the very strong opportunity that we have in Scotland to produce energy.
We are a country that is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Our conventional oil and gas sector continues to be a tremendous asset to the Scottish economy. The sector employs more than 200,000 people in Scotland and, since the 1970s, when resources were first recovered, it has provided more than £300 billion in taxation revenues to Westminster. The future of the sector continues to look promising, with Oil & Gas UK predicting that a further 24 billion barrels of oil are still recoverable. That figure translates into a potential wholesale value of £1.5 trillion if it is managed properly. That has a tremendous potential to transform local communities across Scotland.
The oil and gas sector also represents a significant export and internationalisation opportunity for Scotland. The Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism, Fergus Ewing, is currently in the United States at the offshore technology conference, which brings together many organisations involved in oil and gas. There is a significant presence at the conference of Scottish companies that are trading around the world as a major part of a global industry.