Meeting of the Parliament 11 November 2025
In congratulating Liam Kerr for bringing the debate to the chamber, it is a matter of sadness and shame that the Scottish Government has not arranged a full day’s debate on our energy situation in Scotland. I hope that the minister will comment on that.
Perhaps the world’s foremost energy expert is Daniel Yergin, who won a Pulitzer prize for his book on the oil industry, “The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil Money and Power”. He remarked that the transition from wood to coal took 200 years and the transition from coal to oil took 100 years, from the discovery in Pennsylvania in 1859 to the 1960s, when oil overtook coal as the most widely used fuel.
My point is that transitions take a long time. It takes a long time for things to be done. My God, I was even once told by a rather rueful director of transport at Highland Council that it took five years to build a lay-by. How do we think that we are going to transform everything in Britain, which gets three quarters of its energy needs from oil and gas, by 2030—or by 2045, as the Scottish Government says? It is for the birds.
I worked closely with Paul de Leeuw when I was energy minister, and I regard him as a friend. I have a great deal of admiration for his work and the work of his project director. However, I wonder whether even the lowest scenario of the three scenarios that he sets out on hydrogen, carbon and wind is over-optimistic—I cannot go into the details, because I do not have the time. What I see at the moment is the disengagement of investment from offshore wind. There are troubled times ahead. That is what I am hearing, for various reasons. I am sure that the minister will be aware of that.
Let us look at our oil and gas industry in Britain. North Sea production is among the cleanest in the world. The Greens are not in the chamber—that is a shame, because there is always a possibility that one can learn things in life, even from the most unlikely quarters—but if they were here, they would hear this: the emissions from North Sea production have fallen by 34 per cent since 2018. That is a reduction of one-third in just six years, which is a tremendous achievement. The average is 21kg of CO2 per barrel, which can be compared with fracking gas in the USA, which produces 76kg of emissions; and the level for Qatar is about the same.
Our total emissions from production are a quarter of those elsewhere. Surely a true Green—like myself, for example—would welcome that. I am not against roads or cars—I am against emissions. I am not against oil and gas production in the world—I am against the dirtiest oil and gas production in the world. I cannot help but try to apply logic to problems, and if we apply logic, we see that the world should surely be moving to try to encourage everywhere to replicate the level of emissions reduction that the UK has achieved. We should take the lead—incidentally, there is a lot of money to be made in that, too.
In our daily lives, we rely on oil and gas for everything. The protesters who glued themselves to Pall Mall were using a petrochemical product. The protesters who despoiled a Van Gogh painting by throwing paint at it were using an oil and gas product—I do not know if they knew that. My partner, who is an anaesthetist, uses anaesthetics every day, and just about every anaesthetic drug is a by-product of oil and gas. Do the Greens want us to go back to the days of chloroform and the gag and—without wanting to be grisly—amputation by the saw? That is what they are asking us to do, with the primitive, crude, illogical approach that they take.
Why can we, in Britain, not do what I think that the majority of people in Scotland and south of the border want us to do, which is to support our oil and gas industry, which is the best in the world? For five years, I had a ringside seat and I saw that for myself, all over the world. I saw that our engineers were respected as the best in the world. Let us value them and praise them. As Gary Smith said,
“Oil and gas is not the enemy”.
It is part of the future, along with our renewables.
17:02