[LINK] "Aberdeen prepares for when oil runs out"

[rfmcdonald]

Reuters' Tom Bergen takes a look at the Scottish city of Aberdeen, deeply implicated in the North Sea oil industry, and doing its best to prepare for a post-oil future.

Offshore supply vessels resembling large, floating flat-backed trucks fill Victoria Dock, unable to find charters in a sign of the downturn in Britain's oil industry.

With U.K. North Sea oil and gas production 44 per cent below its peak, self-styled oil capital of Europe Aberdeen fears the slowdown is not simply cyclical: it is targeting diversification into areas including green energy.

Throughout a hydrocarbon heyday that has run to almost five decades, the city has to some extent been preparing for the end.

The oil industry that at one stage sparked talk of Scotland as “the Kuwait of the West” has already outlived most predictions.

“I'm steering my kids away from anything to do with oil,” said John Irvine, a lorry driver who used to work on the rigs. “It's not going to last forever.”

[. . .]

The North Sea industry, with output of 2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day currently, pays more to U.K. government coffers than any other industry, is one of the highest spenders on goods and services and an important employer.

Around 40 per cent of Aberdeen area's £10.5-billion economy is reliant on the industry, according to the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce.

Oil has pushed unemployment in the Granite City, as Aberdeen is known for the hard, volcanic rock from which most of its buildings are constructed, to less than half the U.K. average.

But with Brent crude at around $80 a barrel, nearly half where it was a year ago, the port authority says the harbour is quieter now.