Offshore Britain: Today and Tomorrow

Abstract

IT is now some fifteen years since Sir Alec Douglas-Home's government passed the Continental Shelf Act, bringing the sea bottom resources of the British continental shelf under government ownership and initiating the first period of exploration for offshore energy resources-a period which seems for the time being to have come to a temporary halt, or at least a slowdown compared with the high fever of the mid-1960s or early 1970s. In that fifteen years the whole pattern of British energy resources has changed out of all recognition. Town gas, coal gas, after more than a hundred years of lighting Britain's streets, heating its homes, cooking its meals, and driving its industry-and incidentally polluting its air-is, temporarily at least, a thing of the past. Natural gas from the great fields of the southern North Sea, carried by a national grid all over Britain, has replaced it. Not only that, whereas only twelve years ago the Arab oil boycott, imposed on Britain at the end of the Six Days War, could threaten petrol rationing and seriously damage the British economy, Britain is now approaching self-sufficiency in oil supplies. Each turn of the price screw by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) adds to the potential of Britain's North Sea oil province, bringing more and more of the forty or more smaller oil fields already discovered closer to profitability. In fact, Britain's oil wealth has already become a political embarassment when contrasted with the energy-deficient economies of our principal partners in Europe: France, Germany, and Italy. Voices are heard calling for a more intensive exploitation of North Sea oil resources, alleging that the present policies of the oil internationals are grossly under-representing the scope of these resources and producing an artificial scarcity. Disputes over the division of revenues embarrass government-oil company relations, while the presence of the oil itself exacerbates all kinds of particularism: Shetlands against Scottish nationalism; Scottish nationalism against British or Whitehall nationalism; British nationalism against the European Community. In the last six years developments at sea stemming from the general international framework which gave rise to the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) have extended the division of the