Scotland’s Referendum – The truth about oil in the west coast – right outside my window, literally!
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’ then ‘the Lord giveth back’, good Lord!, and then the Westminster Government try to ‘taketh it away again’. The Lord moves in strange ways.
In the heyday of Clyde shipping 300 large ships slide down the slipway every year. This is the world’s home of shipping and a massive thriving industry employing thousands and thousands of engineers, fitters, turners, welders, riveters, shipwrights, plumbers, painters … the list goes on. Then there’s the support industries, the boilermakers, the steel industry, the transport infrastructure, the specialist engineering firms. Everybody in Glasgow and probably everybody in Scotland knew somebody who worked on Clydeside, if they didn’t work there themselves.
Out of the blue, BP, British National Oil Corporation and AN Other carry out soundings in the Firth of Clyde and subsequently BP applies for a Production License. Clyde shipbuilding are furious and lobby the Government to stop BP sinking rigs in the Firth. This is madness they say. We have 300 plus massive ships using the Firth every year – some pulled by tugs. We can’t have them maneuvering around a field of oil rigs. The Government agrees and the plans are scrapped. Clyde shipbuilding lives to fight another day??
It would be nice to have all that oil but when we are the world leader in shipbuilding, producing over 80% of the worlds big ships on the Clyde we wouldn’t want to jeopardise that for a load of the old ‘Texas tea’. Don’t laugh, it could have happened.
Not to worry, clearly Scotland is floating on oil and would float off into the Atlantic if it was not for the fact that we have beached on a massive bed of coal. Chemically, coal is just like rock solid oil.
We have massive oil reserves in the North Sea, enough to do us for a lifetime, and some!!
In a move that made the Darien Scheme look like a cheap card trick the oil ‘slipped through our fingers’ into the sticky hands of our Westminster masters. £1.5 Tn squandered over 40 years and moves afoot to secure the next £1.5 Tn by denying the Scots their right to Self Determination in the form of an Independent Country.
In an attempted to throw us off the scent Westminster declares the oil will soon be gone. ‘You’re on your uppers then, a pure basket case, but don’t worry we’ll look after you?’ Even Red Riding Hood wouldn’t have fallen for that big fib?
Suddenly I remembered that the ‘wicked witch – we know who she was!’ had decimated our shipbuilding on the Clyde, all the subsidiary industries and the infrastructure – as the ‘good housekeeper’ she was giving the Clyde a bit of a spring clean.
This is where the Lord ‘giveth us back’. No more 300 plus big ships every year trying to weave their way through the Firth of Clyde oil fields. Now we can have our Clyde Field. Bingo! We’re back in play.
‘Haud Oon, you are jokin” they, that is the MoD, have dumped the Western World’s nuclear base in the Firth and baby Trident uses the Firth as its playground – Nae rigs, Nae ifs, Nae buts?
Westminster, of course deny this. There’s no oil there. The MoD aren’t blocking anything. Westminster’s got the paperwork to prove it – well actually we seem to have lost it. What about the MoD – Oh! they’ve lost it too. Well, what about BP – they even applied for a Production License to begin extraction. Would you believe it – gone!
Fortunately, there are some around who still have the knowledge, so I have reproduced an article from The Sunday Post, by Andrew Picken, 9 November 2013 5.21PM. Andrew tells a different story so I have copied it below.
But hold on a minute. I always like to keep the best for last. In 1983 BP revised it’s production plan down to 92 square miles and submitted a new request. The MoD conceded and a License was granted with the following proviso: a production licence was issued to BP for the revised area but with “restrictions — crucially, including no drilling rigs.
Game over, you may think. But then I remember a programme on the BBC (before I began my lifetime embargo of the channel). In this programme the oil industry proudly boasted that they have massively developed their ‘directional drilling’ capability. They can drill down then take a right angle turn and along for about 25 Kilometers, yes 25 kilometers!
GAME BACK ON, I WOULD SAY.
So while the MoD are carrying out their maneuvers in the Firth the Free Scotland underground pipe is sucking out ‘the black stuff’ like there is no tomorrows. Hello welfare, hello full employment, hello pensions for all, hello education for all, hello oil reserve fund. And here’s the best bit: with all this new revenue we could re-build our trademark Clyde shipbuilding.
But here’s the thing. This time our massive diameter, 25 kilometer long oil sucking miracle – IS UNDER THE GROUND, so no giant oil rigs in the Firth blocking their passage. The Lord really does move in strange ways!
We couldn’t have foreseen any of that. But we can confirm that: ‘The Lord giveth it back!’ but this time Westminster bloody well won’t be able to ‘Taketh it back again’ because we have ‘Taketh oorselves away’ out of their greedy reach.
Here’s the article:
A potential oil boom off the west coast of Scotland was blocked by Westminster Defence chiefs.
Declassified UK Government papers from the 1980s show for the first time how the Ministry of Defence was prepared to “pull out all the stops” to prevent any North Sea-style bonanza in the Firth of Clyde.
Ministers at the time said oil firms were “expecting something exploitable” following a series of geological surveys of the area.
But MoD bosses objected to energy giant BP installing drilling rigs in the seas just south of Arran because of fears it would interfere with a vital training and exercise area for nuclear submarines.
Documents from 1983 show how the MoD’s “blanket refusal” to allow test drilling effectively ruled out establishing the full scale of any reserves in the Firth of Clyde.
Chic Brodie, SNP MSP for the South of Scotland, last night accused the UK Government of a “massive cover up”.
He said: “We now have clear evidence the MoD in the early 1980s made it very clear to the Department of Energy it would not tolerate oil drilling and production in the Firth of Clyde.
“This is another McCrone-type deception of the potential use of Scotland’s natural assets.
“I am angry that the people of the West Coast of Scotland, and indeed Scotland as a whole, have been deprived of the economic benefits and income that would have flowed from oil and gas production.”
Last month The Sunday Post reported the claims of David Lambie, a Labour MP in Ayrshire between 1970 and 1992, that he’d been told by key figures in Margaret Thatcher’s Government there was oil in the Firth of Clyde but any further exploration was blocked by the MoD.
Now the claims have been substantiated by a cache of UK Government documents, letters and internal briefings from the early 1980s lodged at the National Archives of Scotland.
The files show three firms, including BP and the then state-owned British National Oil Corporation, undertook seismic surveys in area south of Arran and east of Kintyre in early 1981.
BP then applied for a production licence in the summer of that year for a large area of sea spanning the breadth of the Firth of Clyde.
Letters between the Department for Energy and MoD show defence chiefs asked for no drilling rigs in this area and BP did not pursue its application.
An internal briefing paper from the Industry Department for Scotland in 1984 shows how the department was not told why the application was withdrawn but states “it is a reasonable assumption that opposition from MoD and others (including the Scottish Office) played a large part in the decision”.
A separate document from the Department for Energy states this original plan would have “undoubtedly been the subject of sustained objection from the MoD”.
Speculation over the oil off the Ayrshire coast never went away and in June, 1983 the then Scottish Secretary of State George Younger told The Times newspaper: “The oil companies are playing their cards pretty close to their chests, but they are expecting something exploitable.”
The papers show BP at that time had submitted a revised application for a production licence in a much smaller, 92 square mile stretch of water south of Arran.
A confidential briefing for Mr Younger from November 1983 concedes the “possibility of finding oil or gas in exploitable quantities cannot be confirmed until exploration drilling has taken place” but added the “MoD are known to be very strongly opposed to any drilling taking place in the Firth of Clyde”.
A handwritten note by one of the officials preparing the report said he’d been told by a counterpart in the MoD that “his department’s position was that they saw the Clyde as being of immense strategic importance and that they would pull out all stops to prevent any exploration activity taking place.”
Further documents from 1983 show the Department for Energy asked the MoD to overturn its ban on drilling rigs, which stemmed from the original 1981 BP application, in light of the firm’s revised plans.
The letter to defence chiefs states: “This blanket refusal to agree to any rig under any circumstances rules out testing the area’s hydrocarbon potential and I would expect that only very compelling reasons would lead the MoD to [accept] such a request.”
Five months after this request, a production licence was issued to BP for the revised area but with “restrictions — crucially, including no drilling rigs.
Both BP and the UK Government have confirmed that no drilling took place, meaning the full extent of any exploitable reserves in the Firth of Clyde remains unknown.
Labour Peer Lord Foulkes, who at the time was MP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, said a constituent approached him with draft maps which showed the geology of the Firth of Clyde indicated major deposits of oil and gas.
He said: “We knew the blockage was down to the MoD so it is nice to be finally vindicated.
“David [Lambie] and myself were pressing hard on this because we saw it as a potential economic bonanza — the willing workers, ports, rail and road infrastructure were all there.”