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Agenda item 6 is an evidence session on Scotland’s energy sector, and I refer members to papers 5 and 6. I welcome Professor Paul de Leeuw, the director of the RGU Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, who is joining us remotely. Thank you for joining us today, Paul. Please introduce yourself and proceed with your presentation.
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your committee meeting this morning. I apologise that I cannot be there in person, but I have another event to attend, so I am trying to manage this in the smartest possible way. I have been an industry professional through and through, and I now work at Robert Gordon University in a think-tank and advisory capacity for a wide range of organisations.
I will set the scene for what will happen in the next five to seven years of the energy transition in the oil and gas and renewables industries, particularly from the perspective of Scotland. That will build on some of the evidence that you heard earlier this month from Professor Sir Dieter Helm and others on what is taking place at the moment. If it is alright with you, convener, I will show the committee several slides and quickly go through them, which will open the door to conversation.
The big story that you will hear from me is that the world has changed and that we need to change as well. I will share my slides onscreen, and if somebody could tell me when they can see them, that would be great.
We can see them now, thank you.
Perfect. Thank you.
As I said, I will give you a bit of context about what is happening in the sector. The committee has already heard from a lot of people who have provided this kind of information that the world has fundamentally shifted in the past couple of years. I want to talk about that, because a shifting world means that policy needs to shift, too.
I will give you a characterisation of what has happened in the world of energy in the past couple of years. From what played out with Covid-19, to what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, tariffs and the conflict in the middle east, there has been huge volatility in global energy markets. Of course, that is nothing new; you will be familiar with such volatility. The question is what role energy plays in our national economy. From a UK and Scottish perspective, the issue relates to national security, energy security and economic security, which absolutely go together. It is now a fundamentally different conversation.
That links to the question of what role we as a nation play in this situation. At one end of the spectrum, the climate emergency has not gone away. With all the droughts, wildfires and heatwaves, the emergency has only gone one way: up. However, another global supply reality has emerged that was not previously very visible. After all the issues that you can see on the chart, the world’s shock absorbers have broken down. Every time there is a shock, there is massive volatility, which puts a spotlight on our energy system. Sir Professor Dieter Helm has already talked about that in a powerful way. That volatility makes national treasures such as the North Sea critical and raises questions about how we use it as an energy base in the future.
Interestingly, that exact conversation is now live in other countries around us in north-west Europe. Norway is providing as much energy resilience to Europe as possible. Europe is highly energy-dependent and needs to get supplies from other countries. There are only two countries in Europe that provide significant quantities of oil and gas: the UK and Norway. Norway does not use its own oil and gas; everything is exported. However, it uses the proceeds from oil and gas to accelerate its renewables industry, which has been hugely successful.
The Government in the Netherlands recently changed its policy. It is considering having far more strategic investment, including exploring for more gas in the Dutch part of the North Sea, to ensure energy security in the country. Denmark, a stalwart of net zero, has redeveloped its Tyra gas field and extended licences for oil and gas to 2050, and it is now self-sufficient in gas. Germany and Poland are also changing. The world around us is changing.
A relevant question for this committee is how we ensure that our energy policy is right for the future. Getting a balance between long-term planning and the kind of investment profile that the earlier speakers talked about will be key. Energy pragmatism, which you will hear me talk about a lot, will be critical in this conversation.
That leads to my next slide. I have only four slides, so rest assured that I will not keep you much—[Inaudible.] This picture comes straight from the Government playbook. The picture on the top left comes from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, while the picture on the top right comes from the Climate Change Committee.
I will reiterate what is happening to our energy supply. As a committee, you will be familiar with the fact that the vast majority of primary energy in this country—75 per cent—still comes from oil and gas. Renewables are growing, but that will take time. What is happening in that transition from one to the other is critical.
For those with long memories, in the years 1999 and 2000, the UK produced a supply of 4.5 million barrels per day and was among the top 10 producers in the world. Supply has been going down quite rapidly over time. It is nothing new; we have had a quarter of a century of decline. The UK is a world leader in decline management.
However, the issue is demonstrated by the top line of my graph, which shows demand. It uses units of millions of barrels of oil equivalent per day to show the amount of oil and gas that the UK needs for transport, heating and industrial processes, including chemical plants. The UK uses about 2.5 million barrels of oil and gas per day, and we produce about 1 million barrels per day. It is worth noting that, every day, as long as there is demand, we are importing the remainder. That is worth noting because the fundamental question is, where will our energy security come from if we make the transition to a far more electrified system?
That is what the picture on the right is about, which, as I said, comes from the Committee on Climate Change. There is a real recognition that oil and gas will be part of the energy mix for a long time to come. At the moment, it is predicted that we will consume something in the tune of 13 billion—yes, billion—barrels of oil and gas equivalent between now and 2050. About one third of that will come from the North Sea, and the rest will be imported. That is why what we do with Jackdaw and Rosebank is important. There is a massively polarised debate, with the climate emergency at one end and the economic and energy supply argument at the other, but the issue is hugely important because, if we do not have those projects, where else will the resources that the country needs come from? The conversation is a lightning rod.
It is worth noting that the UK is a relatively small player and Scotland is even smaller. The world consumes the equivalent of Jackdaw and Rosebank’s reserves every three days. On average, the equivalent of 121 Jackdaws and Rosebanks is consumed around the world every year. Although it is an important conversation for the UK from an energy policy and long-term planning perspective, it is a relatively small issue when considered in the context of what we need to do to provide energy security and address affordability and climate emergency issues, as well as supply chain and other long-term challenges.
When we look at the transition from oil and gas to renewables, the decision is about what we do with the industry. Will there continue to be a managed decline, as has happened over the past 25 years, or will a shift in policy accelerate that decline? Every major oil and gas company has now pulled out—[Inaudible.] BP has just announced—[Inaudible.] TotalEnergies is gone, Shell is gone, Equinor is—[Inaudible.]—and BP is selling off assets. There is a message in that: it is not that they are not investing, but that they are no longer investing in the UK. That raises questions about the competitiveness of the UK as an energy base. We have never spent as much money on energy around the world; that money is simply not being spent in the UK. That is a fundamental question because there are implications for the energy transition. The capabilities that we need in oil and gas are exactly the same as those that we need to develop our renewable energy future.
I will take you to the next slide, which puts that in the context of what it means from the perspective of jobs and employment, which will play out in the coming years, particularly during this session of the Scottish Parliament and over the next five years of the committee. Across the UK, just over 150,000 people work in the offshore energy industry in oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and offshore wind. More than 115,000 work in oil and gas, and the remainder are in renewables—[Inaudible.]—in the UK and the north-east of Scotland, particularly in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
About one in 220 people in this country work in or support the oil and gas industry and the wider offshore energy industry. Scotland has a smaller working population, so there is a higher concentration: one in 30 people in Scotland work in or support the offshore energy industry. If we look at the AB postcodes in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, that figure is one in six. Including—[Inaudible.]—jobs, it is closer to one in five or one in four. That is a big deal because, the closer you get to the area, the trickier and more politically sensitive the issue becomes. It is no surprise that oil and gas was a major subject of debate during the by-election in June.
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The obvious point that is worth noting is that, if we decline the oil and gas industry quite rapidly—I will show you this slide in a minute—there will be a real economic impact that we do not tend to talk about, and that is to do with salaries. Salaries in the oil and gas and offshore energy industries tend to be up to two times higher than the average income level in Scotland. If you want to keep the economy at the same size, for every one person you take out of the offshore energy industry, because the job is not here and they go somewhere else, you have to backfill multiple job opportunities elsewhere. That is a real challenge, which I will talk about later.
I want to spend a little time on my fourth slide, which is about timing. The committee has heard plenty in earlier evidence sessions—certainly the ones that I have listened to—about the kind of journey that this is and about clarity. This is not about the destination. We need a cleaner, greener world, and we need to take fossil fuels and hydrocarbons out of the equation. This is about the journey and how we will get there. The chart on the slide that you are seeing now maps out the workforce and the people who work in the offshore energy industry over time. What you see happening in that chart for both oil and gas and offshore renewables depends on the scenario of decline, whether accelerated decline or managed decline. You can see that, over the next five to seven years, particularly in the north-east, the oil and gas workforce will decline faster than the renewables industry will grow, which will create a dislocation.
As a result, people are saying, “Listen, I would love to transfer 90 per cent of the people in oil and gas to adjacent energy sectors, but the jobs are not there.” We call this the Goldilocks zone: if we get it right, we can take all the capabilities—the world-class supply chain, the world-class workforce and the ecosystem in the north-east and across Scotland—and apply them to the offshore energy industry and grow what is in ScotWind, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen. If we get it wrong, all those people and the supply chain will simply go elsewhere, and we will not have the workforce that is required to develop the renewables industry.
As we wrote in our recent report, “Delivering Positive Energy”, the one thing that is really clear is that, if we want to make this a successful transition—a fair and managed transition—co-ordination over the next five to seven years, encompassing the lifetime of this committee and this parliamentary session, will be critical.
The prevention of job losses should be prioritised far more highly than impact mitigation. It is lovely to hear people say, “We will give you money to do an upskilling course”, but that might because it is a nice thing to do, politically. However, the best thing to do is to keep people in their jobs for as long as possible, so that they can make a seamless transition from one industry to another. That would really help to fill the gap, because many of the skills and capabilities will be very similar.
I am conscious of the time, so I will make a final point in summary before I come back to you, convener. We are at a critical time window. This is not something that we can simply think about. Other countries have already moved quite dramatically on this, as I explained in relation to other countries in north-west Europe. To make this work, we need energy pragmatism across the political spectrum. I have said it before, and I will say it again: we have what I call an IKEA moment here. It is pretty clear where we are going. Look at the picture on the box. It is pretty clear that we have the component parts and the tools now. What we need is absolute clarity of the plan in the middle. If we get it right, we can end up with as many jobs and as many economic—[Inaudible.]—as we have now, and probably more. If we get it wrong, we will lose capability and end up with dislocation, less energy capability, and will probably end up importing much more of the net zero—[Inaudible.]. This committee, this Parliament in Holyrood and what is playing out in Westminster at the moment will be critical to ensuring that we develop that plan, so that we do not have an IKEA moment in years to come.
I will stop there and take questions.
Thank you very much, Paul. My apologies that the audio at this end was a bit unclear, but I hope that members were able to gather as much as possible from your presentation. Kate Campbell has the first questions.
Thank you for your presentation, Paul. We could see all the slides, but we could not hear all the words. Apologies if you have already covered this, but I am interested in the factors that you see as being critically important in terms of ramping up job creation. Are they challenges around the grid, such as constraints and curtailment; battery storage to overcome those issues; investment certainty; or other factors? What are the main challenges that we face in our attempts to get job numbers creeping up in renewables?
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
I am sorry; I did not realise that there was a bit of an issue. I will watch your body language carefully to see whether I should correct my speech.
First, you ask whether investment is an issue. It absolutely is. Of course, Government does not have the necessary money, but it can set a framework that gets investors saying that they want to invest in the UK’s energy system. That is key, but that is not happening in oil and gas or in some of the other elements. As I said in my presentation, the world has never spent as much money on energy as it does now, but that is not the case in the UK, and that is not a good message for a G7 country that has the sixth-largest economy in the world to be sending.
The second issue concerns how we do things and what we do. That will be critically important in terms of what happens. What is happening in the oil and gas sector is a good example of what I am talking about. Over recent years, we have made more tax changes in the sector than any other country has done, so the sector needs stability.
The renewables issue is also really interesting. Just think about what we are doing in that regard. We are using the same cables to take the same electrons from the same wind turbines to the same substations as other countries. Other countries can do it in four to six years, but it takes us 10 to 12 years. We face quite an interesting challenge, as our licensing and consenting processes are fundamentally slower than those in other countries. If we acknowledge that we are in a true climate emergency, we really need to speed them up. We can do things differently. Other countries do not issue a licence to a wind farm; they issue a licence with a tie-in and a timeframe. We can give people a solution rather than all the individual parts.
We need to speed up planning, but we can also focus on how we license things. ScotWind is a lovely example. The process was very successful, with everybody involved getting one or two wind licences. However, nobody is big enough to build a factory. We might want to have a greater focus on area developments and activities that involve asking a number of companies to place contracts in the UK. That is not dissimilar to how the oil and gas industry was developed 40 or 50 years ago.
There is a great amount of learning about how to do things differently, but we just need an integrated plan. As I said, this is where Ikea moments come in. We know where we want to be, and we know where we are now; we just need a plan to make the middle part a success.
I am pleased to say that the audio seems to be improving, or maybe it is just that I can follow it more because I can see your lips.
I have a couple of questions, and my sincere apologies if you covered this in your presentation and I just did not pick it up. What would be the consequences for us in Scotland for the energy transition if the Acorn project does not get a speedy final decision in the timeframe that you were talking about of five to seven years?
Acorn has many elements to it that represent different faces of the same coin. It is hugely important symbolically. Currently, there are six industrial clusters identified across the UK, with only one in Scotland: the Acorn cluster. If we do not have any clusters in Scotland, that sends a message that they are not a priority for the country. If you want to decarbonise the country, you need activity that will decarbonize the whole UK. Therefore, it is important that you have the Acorn cluster in Scotland.
Job-wise, different estimates are available depending on what phases of Acorn are embarked on. However, having the Acorn project up and running would give people confidence that Scotland is serious about seizing carbon capture and storage and hydrogen opportunities, which would be helpful.
Acorn is part of the mix. Will it completely change my view of the situation with regard to what I call the Goldilocks zone? We are losing more people than Acorn can make up for, so you need many Acorns to replace the oil and gas industry. However, having that project under way would be a helpful sign about the diversification of our renewables industry.
That brings me to my other point. How many projected job losses are we looking at in oil and gas by, say, 2030? What number of those can we realistically replace with renewable energy jobs in the same period?
We wrote a report last year, which I am happy to submit as evidence to the committee, called “Striking the Balance”, which is about the UK story. We see the oil and gas workforce potentially halving by the early 2030s, going from almost 115,000 to between 60,000 and 80,000—that is the rough range. It is all to do with the level of activity. If you go for managed decline, you are at the higher end of the spectrum, and if you go for accelerated decline, you are at the lower end of the spectrum.
Losing jobs is nothing new. We have been losing jobs every year over the past 10 years. The issue now is that we need the supply chain and the workforce to build the renewable agenda. There is a real consequence of losing those roles. It is worrying, because oil and gas is declining and the renewable industry is not ready. There is nowhere for those people to go at the moment. That is why we are saying that prevention is better than mitigation and you should keep people in jobs for as long as you can until the cavalry is ready and the renewable industry can employ people at scale.
At the moment, unfortunately, that is not the case. The logic that we have is that investment drives activity and activity drives people and jobs, so if the investment does not go in, the activity does not happen and the jobs will not be there. Therefore—this relates to Kate Campbell’s question—it becomes an investment question and an investment confidence question. If we can get that to happen, we will see the activity and the jobs but, at the moment, we do not see that.
Perhaps, on that point, you could bring up chart 4, which was the jobs chart. That was the key point, just to tee it up when the audio is a bit better.
Apologies—we cannot switch it on easily.
Oh, there it is.
Would it be okay if I say a bit more about what the chart means? I apologise if you did not hear what I said.
Yes. I think that we could hear enough, but could you clarify it again and add to the points that Martyn Day asked about?
We can easily share the chart. It shows—this is for the north-east of Scotland, but the story for the rest of the UK is similar—that the issue between now and 2030 is that oil and gas is declining faster than renewables is growing. There is nowhere for the supply chain or workforce to go, unless you accelerate renewables or manage oil and gas smartly, or a combination of those. That will require good planning and management. That is critical, because transferability of the workforce is key. Get it right, and you can keep people employed and keep a world-class supply chain here. Get it wrong, and those people will go somewhere else. There are plenty of jobs for people to go to at this moment in time.
The shape of the chart is to do with the error bands. The blue band is for oil and gas. The activity levels are relatively well known. There could be positives, such as Jackdaw and Rosebank but, in general, we know the direction of travel. The pink band is, in essence, a forecast. When it widens out like that, that is because of the margin of error.
That is mainly driven by ScotWind activities post-2030. Nothing really happens until ScotWind comes in in 2030. That is the bigger element that you can see on the chart. The top part of the bar shows lots of ScotWind, and the bottom part shows very little ScotWind, so it depends how fast ScotWind ramps up. That is what it represents.
Yes, and the majority of ScotWind is floating offshore wind—is that right?
Yes. It is a combination of fixed and floating.
I just wanted to bring in that clarification.
We could do a whole evidence session on the prospects of ScotWind and floating offshore wind.
As another aside, I am pleased that you brought up the timelines for projects, which are 12 years in this country and four to six years in others. I am talking about countries such as Norway and not low-regulation free-for-all countries. Should we be benchmarking ourselves against competitor nations on how quickly we can go from public project inception to delivery, and in particular, should we look at how Norway does things?
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Different countries do different things. I have talked about the far east and the middle east. My argument is that, because the emergency has increased with the heatwaves, droughts and wildfires, we urgently need to go faster, and that is a compromise that we need to think about. We have democratic processes for planning, consenting and how we do all that stuff, and we need to balance that nicely.
Our argument is that there is probably a middle way. At the moment, compared with other countries, we have hugely slow systems to get our renewables elements in place, and that leads to the bridging question. In 10 or 15 years, if we are sitting here having this conversation again, the world will look very different and we will have lots of the renewables in place.
We need to take the best practice from other countries and think about how we plan things. That takes me back to the conversation that you had a few weeks ago on what the strategic spatial energy plan for Scotland should look like, the regional plan elements, and what the priority will be. We have to start thinking about managing this far more proactively, quickly and smartly as an integrated energy step for Scotland.
The other hugely important question that I would focus on if I was in your position is: what is the outcome? At the moment, as an industry and as a nation, we are in a process conversation about how we build wind farms and develop the grid. I am far more interested in having an outcome conversation. I want Scotland and the UK to have the most competitive, greenest and cleanest energy systems. Basically, we can build an economy on the back of this. How do we make sure that what we do—and the speed that we do it at—gives us low-cost clean energy that is the envy of the world? What I do not want is a slow, high-cost energy system. Nobody wants that, but there is a risk that that is where we are heading, as you heard clearly from Dieter Helm as well.
Yes. That leads on to my other question. You are absolutely right that we want to get to a point where we have low-cost, sustainable, carbon-neutral energy. The question is how we get there. In the meantime—again, this reflects what Dieter Helm said—we are reliant on oil and gas, and that goes beyond just electricity.
One thought that occurred to me when you were making your presentation was that licence applications for the North Sea, and particularly Rosebank and Jackdaw, are treated as binary things—either we do them or we do not. Either the carbon stays in the ground or it does not. However, the reality is that we will continue to burn gas whether those projects go ahead or not. Should we be thinking about this more in terms of the opportunity cost? If so, has anyone done that calculation? If we do not get our gas from projects in the North Sea, where will we get it from? What would be the carbon impact of getting it from those other sources?
I apologise if you could not hear this, but I mentioned earlier that Rosebank and Jackdaw are lightning rods. There is an issue but, again—[Inaudible.] The demand is still there, because we still need energy to warm our homes and we still need it for transport and all the other things. Some 70 to 75 per cent of the UK’s primary energy comes from oil and gas.
The question is whether we should do Rosebank and Jackdaw and, if we do not, where else the product will come from. To my mind, it makes complete sense, particularly from a gas perspective, to use what we have in the North Sea. It gives us jobs, economic benefit and funding that we can use for the benefit of other elements, and it is also cleaner than the alternative. For me, it makes sense to do it as a bridge.
We make these things a neat and binary conversation, but the world—I do not believe that you heard this earlier—is consuming a Jackdaw or a Rosebank every three days, so 121 a year. This is a big conversation in the UK, but it is not a big conversation on a world scale. We need to be pragmatic. If we do not get the—[Inaudible]—playing out in the middle east and—[Inaudible.]
We need to balance the energy portfolio. The most successful countries in the world do not have a binary choice of one thing or the other. They have nice, mitigated energy portfolios and different energy sources. It is critical that Scotland and the UK also have a balanced energy portfolio. I am completely with you—there is a real opportunity cost if we do not—[Inaudible.]—methods to reinvest it—[Inaudible.]
According to your report, since 2016, we have lost 14,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector, and I believe that we will lose a further 18,000 by 2035, which equates to an average of 1,600 a year. You said that we should open up Jackdaw and Rosebank to preserve those jobs, but you also argue that there should be a bridging approach to transition to provide jobs in the renewables sector in the north-east. What is the sweet point that moves jobs over to renewables? Have you done any work on that? In which year would that aim be met, and would it be contingent on the Scottish Government opening up Jackdaw and Rosebank?
There are a few things to note. The figure of 14,000 jobs that you quoted is for the north-east of Scotland only; the national picture is way more than that. That is absolutely right and is from our latest report. Over the past 10 years, we have lost about 18,000 jobs. We gained 4,000 renewable jobs, so that is a net loss of 14,000 jobs. We are potentially going to lose another 18,000 jobs in the north-east of Scotland. One thing to keep in mind is that the north-east of Scotland represents roughly a quarter of the jobs to be lost in the UK. On average, we are losing far more jobs on a monthly basis, which is pretty serious for the UK Government.
We have done a huge amount of modelling, working with all the authorities, and with Government officials at Westminster and in Scotland. From all the work that we have done, and particularly given the delay in the renewables agenda, we see that sweet spot—part of our Goldilocks zone—as being in the early 2030s. We need to sustain as many jobs as we can, certainly this decade and early next decade, before the bigger activity comes in in the early 2030s. That will be critical.
You asked about Jackdaw and Rosebank—the lightning rods—but they are only part of the conversation. If it gets approval, Jackdaw is built and can be on stream very quickly. You do not have more jobs attached to it, other than for operators. Rosebank is also predominantly built but will take a bit longer to get on stream. They will not give you a lot of jobs, but the main message here is that, if you want to keep the oil and gas industry growing for that period until the renewables activity is ready, you need to give investors confidence to invest post-Jackdaw and Rosebank. That would involve a combination of incremental licensing, as is happening in the Netherlands now, with far more, strategically, around it, and new activity, as is happening in Norway. All the countries around us are doing that. All that we are saying is that we should do more of what other countries around us, which have very pragmatic energy policies, are doing. Buy the nation five to seven years. Over time, oil and gas will still decline, but it is really material to get this right.
The other thing that is worth noting is the value price to the UK. I mean value price in many ways. It includes the environmental price, because some developments, particularly in the North Sea, will have a lower carbon footprint than imports. The North Sea will generate income that we can use to accelerate renewables. It will keep the jobs in the supply chain, but every billion barrels that are extracted—remember that we need 13 billion barrels of oil in the supply chain—at the current price gives us almost a billion more in revenue that we can use to help the Scottish economy and the UK economy.
I am not saying that you should keep oil and gas going—that is not what I am saying at all, because oil and gas will decline. I am just suggesting that you use them as a bridge to help to accelerate renewables. We are going to use the funding, the money, the supply chain and the capabilities to do all the good stuff that we want to do, but we need to use it wisely. At the moment, we are not. We are letting oil and gas decline very quickly, and we are not going to renewables. We get the worst of everything, and then the rest gets imported. That cannot be a good policy for a country the size of the UK or Scotland. That is not a recommended policy.
Prices are almost unaffordable for consumers right now. The domestic energy prices that consumers face are about £300 or £400 extra per annum. You are arguing that we should have a more pragmatic, bridging approach to transition. Consumers are being levied for the transition to renewables. Would such an approach result in their bills coming down?
I will make a couple of observations. We are an energy-rich country. The North Sea is a national treasure, and it will continue to be a multi-energy powerhouse for decades to come. It is very strange for me to see a nation that is so energy rich with such a high energy price. It is very unusual; it is really strange.
It is a matter of how we develop activities. I mentioned having my Ikea moment. We know what the end point looks like: competitive, clean, green energy for the consumer. I also know what the starting point is: it is the point that I made—[Inaudible.]—so we need to get this absolutely right. Will doing more Rosebanks and more Jackdaws change the price? No, because it is happening in the world market. However, it will generate money for the UK Government and the Scottish Government, which can be invested in other elements that can help the public.
It is about integrated thinking and using the funding that is available in one industry to help and develop something else. That is what Norway has done. To an extent, Spain and Portugal do it. The models are there. Use them in a pragmatic way, because it is not a matter of doing one thing or the other. That is a polarised and unhelpful conversation. Oil and gas will decline and renewables get bigger. It is a matter of managing that in such a way that the consumer benefits.
The worst outcome with an oil and gas decline is to build an unbelievably expensive electricity system and then have this conversation again every single year for the next 15 years. That is really unhelpful. That is the fear: that we might be heading towards that unless we get it right.
There are no further questions from members.
Paul, thank you again for your presentation today. How would you like to conclude? What are the key points that you are making? The questions from Rachael Hamilton brought them out, in fact. We need the jobs and the energy from oil and gas to continue to give us a chance of developing a supply chain and a jobs future from other energy that can take its place.
I would make this request of the committee and all the wise people around you. The world has changed. That is absolutely clear. Other countries are changing. This is the time when cross-party consensus can drive us to a long-term energy strategy for the country. We can get it right. The Holyrood election has just happened, and you are going to be in power for five years. This is the time to shape the strategy.
My request would be to build an energy system based on a comparatively low cost that is competitive, clean and smart, rather than focusing on the process and the inputs. If we do that, we will end up with a very complicated energy system that does not help consumers or the country and that is uncompetitive. That would be my main request, and it goes back to my Ikea moment: see what the product looks like and what the starting point looks like, then build an integrated plan and rely on the people who know how to do this.
Thanks very much. You will send the committee the slides from today, and we can make them public. A number of figures about jobs were quoted, and we were sometimes not sure which related to jobs for the north-east, for Scotland or for the whole of the UK. Is there a piece of data work that you could share with us that makes those numbers absolutely clear?
No problem. I will send you the reports, where it is clearly stated what is national and what relates to the north-east of Scotland.
Thank you again. We can now conclude our business for today.
Could I put something on the record?
Of course.
I thank Paul de Leeuw for coming and sharing his thoughts with us, but I found that evidence session really difficult, because I could not hear. There are probably quite a lot of questions that I had for Paul that I could not put to him, and there were things that he was saying that I would have liked to have had more of a discussion about, but it did not feel like a proper environment to have that discussion, because it was not clear what the answers were.
Perhaps we could take some learning from that evidence session to ensure that we have a good clear connection. Not having that hindered the quality of discussion that we could have had today.
That is a good point. Apologies to you, too, Paul, for that. I think that the majority of your message came through clearly enough, although it was hampered a little bit by the audio.
I will be in person next time.
This was our first online presentation today. Perhaps we can learn from it.
That concludes our public business. Our next meeting will be next week, on Tuesday 29 September, when we will have evidence sessions with the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Tourism and Transport and the Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Energy.
12:00
Meeting continued in private until 12:11.
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Economy and Labour Market