Career platform - opportunities in the UK oil and gas sector

This year’s budget was hailed by chancellor George Osborne as ‘an advertisement for investment and jobs in Britain’. For the oil and gas sector, it was confirmation that the government would support the industry in difficult times.

Osborne’s measures included a £3bn new field allowance for large and deep fields to open up west of Shetland - the last area of the basin left to be developed. The move was designed to encourage billions of pounds of investment in the North Sea, where production has been falling since 1999.

According to Oil & Gas UK, the tax allowances will lead to an extra £50bn being pumped into the industry, resulting in the recovery of an additional 1.7 billion barrels of oil and gas. This, it said, would stimulate the need for more highly skilled engineers in a sector that currently contributes £8bn a year to the exchequer. However, it added that the public’s perception of the industry is often distorted and that more needs to be done to make engineers aware of the opportunities available. It claims that too many people outside key industry centres, such as Aberdeen and the north east of England, are unaware of the importance of the oil and gas sector in the UK economy.