Aberdeen was four decades too late.

The question isn’t whether the North Sea workforce has a future. It’s whether the UK wants that future to happen here.

GA Drilling just raised $44m to commercialise a system that could make deep geothermal economically viable. One of the world’s biggest drilling contractors invested. So did a top-tier deepwater operator.

They ran the live trial in a Norwegian wellbore. Not a British one.

The IEA reckons more than three quarters of what’s needed to scale next-generation geothermal already exists in the oil and gas supply chain.

Same rigs. Same engineers. Same skills that built the North Sea. The people best placed to drill for heat are the people currently drilling for hydrocarbons.

Norway saw this. NORCE built the Ullrigg test facility in Stavanger in 1987 and has been running live trials in it for nearly forty years.

The Net Zero Technology Centre’s new test rig at Bridge of Don opens later this year — a 32-metre rig back on Aberdeen’s skyline, built for exactly this kind of work. Good. Necessary.

Roughly four decades late.

That’s the real story. NZTC has the remit, £180m of public and industry money, a National Geothermal Centre and a horizontal drilling test rig coming online.

The capability is finally being built. But while we were getting round to it, Norway was running trials, attracting Tier-1 operators and quietly becoming the default address for serious downhole innovation.