UK Oil and Gas Industry

Debate between Kirsty Blackman and Peter Aldous

Thursday 19th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Colin Clark) on securing the debate, and it is an honour and a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman).

In the last four years, the oil and gas industry in the North sea has come under considerable pressure, and tens of thousands of jobs have been lost. The industry has adapted and, while challenges remain, it continues to be a vital component part of the UK’s economic base. It still supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and delivers more than half the nation’s oil and gas. There are up to 20 billion barrels of oil and gas still to recover, and the UK supply chain continues to be a world leader, with unrivalled experience in maximising economic recovery from a mature base. The industry makes a consistent contribution of around £1 billion per annum in tax revenues, and the wider tax contribution from across the supply chain is immense.

The Vision 2035 document confirms that the extraction of oil and gas on the UKCS is not a sunset industry. It has a vital role to play in adding to the UK’s energy security, ensuring a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy and creating highly skilled jobs that we can take around the world.

I will first provide a short overview on the national outlook, its successes in the face of adversity and the immediate challenges that need to be addressed. I shall then focus on the southern North sea off the East Anglian coast, where there are specific and exciting opportunities, although work is required if their potential is to be fully realised for the benefit of both the local and national economies.

I am mindful that, in the southern North sea, different energy sectors operate side by side, cheek by jowl—particularly gas, offshore wind and electricity transmission. I pose the question: should they come together and work as one? I am perhaps running before I can walk in saying that, but I will outline a scenario for how those sectors can work more collaboratively for the benefit of industry, people and the places from which those people come.

Notwithstanding the considerable pressures that the industry has faced in recent years, and while in many respects it is still battered and bruised, it is generally in a good place and there is exciting potential ahead of us. In 2017, UK upstream deals exceeded £8 billion. The UKCS production remains stable, despite some start-up delays and unplanned outages. Average unit operating costs have halved, from around $30 per barrel equivalent in 2014 to $15 in 2017. There were at least five exploration successes last year, with a combined discovery of 350 billion barrels equivalent. Around £5.5 billion of post-tax cash flow was generated on the UKCS—more than in any other year since 2011.

There is considerable potential to build on those successes this year, with at least 12 new developments, worth around £5 billion of capital investment, expected to be sanctioned, and with production forecast to increase by 5%. Set against that backdrop, 62% of supply chain companies surveyed by Oil and Gas UK have a positive outlook for 2018. That said, considerable challenges must be addressed if that potential is to be realised. Just 94 wells were opened up on the UKCS in 2017—the smallest number since 1973. Development drilling has fallen by around 45% in the past two years, with supply chain revenues falling by more than £10 billion from 2014. Despite the cost improvements for the supply chain, average EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation—fell by £1.7 billion from 2014-16. Moreover, cash flow continues to be a major concern.

Even if all the fields discovered last year were developed, the reserve replacement ratio of 0.6 is not enough to sustain production. The fall in investment from 2014-17 means that production decline is likely to increase in the early 2020s. Sustaining efficiency gains is vital if the basin is to continue to attract investment. Moreover, it is important to improve exploration success and the commercial viability of existing discoveries.

A particular challenge that the industry faces, which we have heard about quite a lot today, is to reinvigorate the supply chain and to make it more resilient. It is important that we tackle this task; not to do so would be irresponsible. A strong supply chain will help sustain the industry and will open up significant export opportunities. Operators need to work more collaboratively with their supply chain businesses—sharing information, encouraging innovation and looking at new working practices. Addressing this challenge should be part of the sector deal, and the Oil and Gas Authority and the Government should work with the industry to help promote a new approach to collaborative supply chain working. Much can be learned from other industries, such as car manufacturing in the north-east and the west midlands.

Since 2012, the Government have generally worked well and closely with the sector, improving the fiscal regime and thereby helping to attract inward investment. That will continue as the driving investment programme is delivered. However, while Government policy is supportive, a number of decisions by HMRC—as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North touched on—have been taken without full and proper consideration of the impact on the oil and gas industry.

A particular example, as the hon. Lady mentioned, is HMRC’s decision in January to end long-standing exemptions for shipwork end-use relief from July of this year. For the oil and gas sector, this exemption—known as CIP33—provides relief from customs duties for equipment that is destined to be used in offshore installations, such as spare parts. The decision was taken at short notice, with no consultation with the industry.

[Kirsty Blackman]

The other thing that particularly concerned me about this was that I received a letter from the Financial Secretary to the Treasury that directly contradicts the decision taken by HMRC, which confused the issue further. The two appear to be giving totally different guidelines on this. It would be great to have clarity.

[Peter Aldous]

I thank the hon. Lady for reinforcing that point. It is difficult to attract investment, and the Government have worked very hard to make this basin one of the most attractive in the world to invest in, but these sort of noises coming out of HMRC reverberate around the world. A solution needs to be found very quickly.

While much of the industry’s focus in recent decades has been on Scotland, when exploration started on the UKCS in 1960s it did so in the southern North sea. That area is now on the verge of a renaissance, with the opportunity of reinventing itself as an all-energy basin, which, with the right policies in place, can play a significant role in the UK’s future energy strategy.

The southern North sea is at a critical juncture. For more than 50 years, the basin has developed and delivered strong gas production through a diverse network of offshore platforms, pipelines and onshore terminals. The basin has been well exploited, and the opportunity to identify and develop large, landmark discoveries is increasingly limited. There is potential with both marginal pools and tight gas, but they are increasingly expensive and complex to access, the technical and commercial risks are high and opportunities can often be quickly disregarded as uneconomic.

The challenge for the southern North sea is now to search for innovative business and technical solutions. This challenge is made more difficult by depressed commodity prices, aging infrastructure and increasing unit transportation costs, as production from existing developments continues to decline. The selection of projects is based on their ability to have a big impact, their prospect of success and the potential to achieve it within a reasonable timescale.

There are currently five priorities in the southern North sea. The first is to realise the full potential of decommissioning opportunities for the benefit of the East Anglian region, which I will come on to in more detail in a moment. The second is to unlock potential tight gas developments. The third is to realise the full potential of the synergies between renewables and oil and gas. The fourth, in the light of Brexit, is to find the best way to work across borders with the Dutch sector. The final one is to minimise production losses due to salting.

It is estimated that 40 platforms in the southern North sea are to be decommissioned by 2022; as I said, it is the oldest part of the basin. That business is worth several billion pounds, with significant job safeguarding and enormous earnings potential for the East Anglian region. However, there is a real and present danger that we will lose much of that work to our European neighbours, where port infrastructures have received investment from their Governments.

East Anglia does not have a level playing field on which to compete with our main competitors in the southern North sea—as I said, on the other side of the sea. Locally, the councils, the New Anglia local enterprise partnership and other supporting agencies, such as the East of England Energy Group, stand ready to support the industry, but there is a need for central Government to get involved and back them if we are to realise for the region the full potential of that significant opportunity.

We need a decommissioning challenge fund similar to that in Scotland, to help to establish a cluster of expertise, as is happening in Dundee with the Tay cities deal. We need to have an aspirational UK local content policy, as already happens with offshore wind. That would help to ensure a return to UK plc, as the Government are already funding between 50% and 75% of UK decommissioning. It would focus operators’ attention on using the local supply chain and would help to support the supply chain action plans that have recently been introduced for decommissioning projects. As I said, EEEGR is willing—it is indeed eager—to lead and to host a taskforce to spearhead that initiative. It would be match-funded by other local agencies, although it would need funding from central Government to establish and then help to maintain it.

The other opportunity in the southern North sea with exciting potential is closer collaboration and working between the oil and gas, offshore wind and offshore transmission sectors. If that can be achieved, a significant contribution can be made to addressing the UK’s ongoing energy trilemma of keeping costs to consumers affordable, ensuring security of supply and smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy. We need to integrate energy production activities—for example, in respect of oil, gas and electricity—and share common infrastructure for distributing energy. Doing that will achieve significant economic benefits. The co-location of gas-powered electricity generation with gas production hubs would help to maximise the economic recovery from gas fields. The better utilisation of common infrastructure would improve the economic value of both the associated renewable and the hydrocarbon production assets. Collaboration between those sectors is slowly improving and could be accelerated by facilitating and enabling Government policies.

Two main issues are inhibiting more effective collaboration between the sectors. First, the regulatory regimes are quite separate; some of the regulators are not used to working together and they have different policy objectives. Secondly, cross-sector collaboration is not incentivised, as Government policy is highly sectorised.

A possible starting point for improving the situation and promoting cross-sector collaboration would be consideration of the UKCS as an energy basin, rather than a series of separate energy sectors. That integration could be the specific responsibility of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, albeit delivered through parties such as the OGA, National Grid, Ofgem and the Planning Inspectorate.

The three sectors would also benefit from incentives to work more collaboratively. Sector deals provide an opportunity to make it more attractive for the different sectors to work together, at both the developmental and the operational stages. That could include financial support for cross-sector innovation, improved regulatory cohesion, facilitating the movement of workforce skills between the sectors, and research and development. It may well be that a pilot could be set up for such innovative cross-sector working in the North sea. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss that with my right hon. Friend the Minister, along with industry representatives.

During the past 50 years, oil and gas extraction on the UKCS has brought enormous benefits to the UK. It has created hundreds of thousands of well-paid, highly skilled jobs, attracted significant inward investment from all over the globe and provided a huge annual dividend to the Exchequer. The past four years have probably been the most difficult in the basin’s life, yet notwithstanding a great deal of pain and personal anguish, it has come through this tough period in better shape than could reasonably have been hoped for and is ready to continue to play a full and leading role in the post-Brexit economy.

Since 2012, the Government have given the industry a very fair hearing and backed it, both fiscally and with the creation of the Oil and Gas Authority. Exciting opportunities lie ahead. It is important that the spirit of co-operation in the oil and gas supply chain continues, improves and, as I have outlined, extends to cross-sector working. It is said that if you go to any oil and gas basin around the world, you will hear Scottish, Geordie, Suffolk and Norfolk accents. We must ensure that that continues for at least 50 or—dare I say it?—100 more years.