When oil is no longer in demand

STEWART SPENCE WAS a young hotelier in Aberdeen in 1971 when he first realised what an oil rush meant. His hotel, the Commodore, was the only one in the Scottish city with en-suite bathrooms. One day an American oil executive strode in, wearing denims, cowboy boots and a stetson. Once assured that the bedrooms had private facilities, he booked 20 rooms for six months and paid upfront by banker’s draft. The American, boss of an oil-services company called Global Marine, was ferrying three oil rigs from the Gulf of Mexico to Aberdeen. Thus began Scotland’s North Sea oil boom. Steak houses, cigars and words like roughneck and roustabout took hold. Texans famously drank Dom Pérignon champagne out of pint mugs. They lived the high life until oil prices crashed in 1986. Then they disappeared almost as swiftly as they had come, says Mr Spence.

Since those days oil has brought both boom and bust to Aberdeen, but never before the sense of despondency that grips the city today. In 2012 it had more multi-millionaires per 100,000 people than London and the world’s busiest heliport, taking workers to and from the rigs. But the oil-price crash in 2014 drove home the fact that after almost half a century of exploitation, many of Aberdeen’s offshore fields have become too expensive to be sustainable. The number of jobs has plummeted, and some oil...