Mind the Gap

Picked up today's Press & Journal in Sainsbury's this morning, started reading Craig Walker's editorial right there in the aisle, and walked out without my milk.

That's the effect a good piece of writing has.

His argument: if Andy Burnham becomes prime minister, Aberdeen should be the first place he visits, not the last.

Sir Keir Starmer never made that trip. Craig is asking Burnham to make it his opening move instead of an afterthought.

The numbers do the talking.

Around 115,000 people still work across the UK's offshore oil and gas sector, and the north-east stands to lose a further 18,000 jobs by 2035 if investment keeps faltering.

On the other side of the ledger, Craig points to Offshore Energies UK's proposed Oil and Gas Price Mechanism, an alternative to the windfall tax that industry believes could unlock up to £50 billion of private investment on the UK Continental Shelf.

That's the gap between a managed transition and a mismanaged one.

Nobody disputes the two headline facts. Britain wants more sustainable energy. The North Sea is a mature basin in decline. That's not the debate.

The debate is timing. We all want the transition. It isn't here yet. Not at the scale, and not at the speed, that lets Aberdeen simply switch from one industry to the next.

Elsewhere in the same paper, a different version of that gap.

A UK Government study has found high potential for new nuclear in Scotland, including small modular reactors, with three existing sites at Torness, Dounreay and Hunterston already in the mix.