What Europe's oil and gas capital can tell us about the growing pains of a just transition

Originally published on Jan. 23, 2022.

Perched atop a hill in St. Fittick's Park, Lesley-Anne Mulholland gestures at her surroundings with exasperation. Cranes dot a breakwater, while cherry-pickers move ground nearby. Not far off, there's an incinerator and a sewage treatment plant. 

"As you can see, we are getting encroached [on] by industry here," she said.

St. Fittick's Park is in the neighbourhood of New Torry in the coastal city of Aberdeen, Scotland, which is considered the hub of Europe's oil and gas industry. But the park predates the fossil fuel boom.

"The legend is that St. Fittick was washed up on the shore here," said Mulholland. "People used it as a place of pilgrimage, I guess, and the settlements grew out of that, with fishing and shipbuilding. And so it's quite an ancient place, really."

But in 1973, the fishing village of Old Torry was torn down to make room for an oil and gas terminal onshore. Exploration of the North Sea Continental Shelf yielded riches for the city in the form of a new economy based on fossil fuels.

Mulholland, who has called Torry home for more than three decades, worries her community will be a casualty once more as the region makes plans to shift its economy to renewable energy sources. "It's happening again," she said.

Last year, Aberdeen City Council submitted a development proposal that earmarked areas of the city as part of an "energy transition zone." The plans, which are largely undefined, include a request to rezone a portion of St. Fittick's Park. The proposal is under regulatory review by the Scottish government and will be decided in August 2022.

Aberdeen City Council acknowledged CBC's request for comment, but deferred questions to ETZ Ltd.

Mulholland jokes that St. Fittick, the patron saint of gardeners, would not "be too happy that his garden, or Torry's garden, [had] been upset, and proposed to be industrialized for energy transition."

She supports the U.K.'s shift from fossil fuels, but worries about losing the health and environmental climate benefits of her community's only green space, which includes a garden and a playground as well as a restored wetland to absorb and filter water. 

"It just beggars belief that they want to take our park," Mulholland said, starting to cry. "I'm sorry, I get very emotional about it. I just can't understand why they would rob us of this for money."

The fight to save St. Fittick's Park is emblematic of a larger story in the region, the country and beyond. As climate scientists tell the world to end the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, questions linger about how to make this happen while ensuring economic and social well-being.

The promise of jobs

When Aberdeen City Council set aside land in its proposed local development plan, that included part of the park. Opportunity North East, a company helmed by billionaire Sir Ian Wood, former CEO of the Wood Group, oversees the transition zone, and in April 2021 established a non-profit company called ETZ (Energy Transition Zone) Ltd.

In a statement to CBC, a spokesperson for ETZ Ltd. said the company will create 2,500 "direct jobs" and 10,000 "energy transition-related jobs across the region," but did not disclose what those jobs would be or how they would be created.

The company also said it would "prioritize" young people in Torry as part of a forthcoming apprenticeship.

Muholland is skeptical that the company's promises will yield benefits for Torry. "They say there's going to be jobs and training, but are they going to be specifically for people in this area?"

Jason Bruce, a seafarer who has worked moving oil rigs offshore for nearly 30 years, thinks the promise of jobs is "hot air." (CBC is protecting his real name, as he fears losing work for being critical of the oil industry.)

"There's no business plan in the public view," said Bruce, who spends part of his time in Aberdeen.

For Bruce, the prospect of losing part of a well-loved community park "doesn't seem [like] a very good start, you know — to be destroying nature for this green project without any details." 

While Aberdeen has made economic gains off fossil fuels, not all neighbourhoods in the city share in that wealth. Based on the Scottish government's 2020 Index of Multiple Deprivation, which assesses things like level of income, health and access to services, part of Torry ranks overall lowest in the city. 

The proposal to rezone part of the park is "depriving a really poor area of this last green space," said Bruce.

Complex certification

Now 48, Bruce got his start in the fossil fuel industry by default. When he trained to become a seafarer, what he wanted was to see the world.

"Unfortunately, the British Merchant Navy was dying off at that time, so I was pigeonholed into oil and gas," he said.

Despite his years in the industry, Bruce wants to see the end of the extraction and use of fossil fuels. "At the end of the day, we are talking about the possible destruction of our planet," he said. "We don't have another one."

According to the North Sea Transition Deal published in March 2021, the U.K. government expects up to 40,000 new jobs will be created as a result of efforts to decarbonize industry in the North Sea. The industries include the carbon capture utilization and storage sectors, as well as green hydrogen from wind energy.

The Offshore Wind Industry Council estimates that sector alone could support 27,000 jobs if 30GW of offshore wind is built by 2030.

Despite the boom in offshore wind farms and big promises for bolstering employment, for Bruce, it's not as simple as leaving one field for another. He says not only is there little work currently available, but there's a financial burden he and other offshore workers face: certifications from one line of work don't transfer to the other, even if it's the same skill.

For example, Bruce is required to complete and pay for three separate medical exams: one for the British Merchant Navy, one for the oil and gas sector and another for the wind sector. He also requires separate certifications for the same skills in those sectors, for which he must also foot the bill.

"It bothers me that there doesn't seem to be any joined-up thinking about the future," said Bruce.

The Danish example

That disconnect is something activists and union groups are fighting to solve.

In a survey co-published by the non-profits Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland and Greenpeace, 81.7 per cent of offshore oil and gas workers said they would consider moving to jobs outside of the fossil fuel industry.

The report calls for standardizing certification in the offshore oil and wind industries, as well as investment in training, and stipulations that projects — such as the decommissioning of wells, expansion of docks and the development of offshore wind — move forward "with a requirement for quality jobs locally."

"The potential still exists for Scotland to support the creation of a sufficient number of jobs to replace those in the oil and gas industry. However, we are not currently on course to deliver it," said Ryan Morrison, a just transition campaigner with Friends of the Earth who worked on the report.

He noted that while the amount of wind energy generated offshore in Scotland has increased, the number of jobs has actually decreased in recent years.

Yet across the North Sea, Denmark has secured a booming offshore wind sector after the government invested heavily in it in the 1980s.

"We didn't do this and our infrastructure hasn't been able to compete as a consequence," said Morrison.

He also noted that "Denmark's policy of mandating wind farms to be part-owned by local co-operatives or residents' groups has ensured wide public support for building wind farms."

Ørsted, the Danish state-owned wind company, has become an international investor in wind energy, including in the U.K.

Morrison said if the U.K. acts now and invests in ports and manufacturing, and changes requirements for ownership of power companies so they are majority British-owned and required to hire locally, the country may be able to emulate Denmark's success.

An uncertain future

Despite the fear and uncertainty, there is a lot of hope Aberdeen can be home to a profitable, green future.

Murat Kece sees the city as a good base for the U.K.'s energy transition, precisely because of all the people with expertise in the oil and gas sector and the innovation he's seen. 

After moving from Turkey to Aberdeen in 1990 to pursue his career as an engineer in the oil and gas sector, Kece now works independently as a consultant, advising businesses on how to lower their emissions.

He admits he is trying to make amends after reckoning with the environmental damage caused by an industry he's profited from. When Kece learned decades ago that Shell pumped contaminated water from oil production into an underground reservoir in southeastern Turkey, it gave him pause.

But things truly changed for him when his kids graduated from university with engineering degrees and refused to work in the oil industry.

"They said that this is a dirty business," said Kece. "I really felt it, because I've been part of it for so long and that really made it dawn on me that, yeah, I need to do more."

Frederik Bjerregaard doesn't share Kece's optimism about Aberdeen's position to profit from a transition off fossil fuels. When the 23-year-old Dane moved to Aberdeen to pursue an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, he was struck by the city's slogan.

"Aberdeen, the oil capital of Europe," he said is "perpetuating the stigma" of being a fossil fuel centre.

Bjerregaard also knows that oil and gas wealth has largely funded the engineering department at the University of Aberdeen, where the fourth-year student is the co-president of the Society for Energy Transition.

He hopes that by studying for a career in wind energy, he can "at least take the money and do something good with it."

As the world weans itself off fossil fuels, whether by choice or by default, he says all communities will need to prepare for the economic consequences.

"The question is, when are you going to take the hit? Because it's going to come at some point."

Written and produced by Molly Segal.