Will the UK Still Have the People to Drill Baby Drill?

The Strait of Hormuz has closed again. Iran shut it on Saturday after the US pressed ahead with its naval blockade the second closure in weeks, with around 20% of the world’s seaborne oil trade now blocked.

Energy markets are in turmoil. Politicians are reaching for their toughest language.

And someone, somewhere, will inevitably say the words: drill baby drill.

But here is what that slogan runs into a problem that existed long before Hormuz and will remain long after it reopens.

Britain may not have the people to do it.

The workforce is already disappearing.

The UK’s oil and gas sector employed around 190,700 people in 2016.

By 2024, that had fallen to 115,000. In a single year alone — 2023 to 2024 — 5,000 jobs were lost. Robert Gordon University projects the workforce could shrink to between 57,000 and 71,000 by the early 2030s.

In their starkest terms: the equivalent of 400 jobs lost every two weeks for five years.

The workforce that remains is ageing. Nearly half of those still in the sector are over 45. The engineers who built careers during the North Sea’s boom years are retiring.

The graduates who should have replaced them chose different careers rationally, after watching two decades of boom-and-bust, pay cuts of 20–30%, and years of policy uncertainty that made offshore work a poor long term bet.

The people who know how to do this work are leaving. The people who would have replaced them didn’t arrive.