UK oil production plummets 10%
UK oil production dropped by 10% during 2004 – one of the biggest falls amongst producers last year, according to figures published by global oil firm BP.
There were 228,000 fewer barrels being pumped out per day across the North Sea oil fields compared with the previous 12 months.
Only Australia saw a bigger fall in the rate of production – 13.9%.
Last autumn it emerged that the UK had become a net importer of oil for the first time in 13 years.
Paul Horsnell, head of energy research at Barclays Capital, said: “These mature fields (in the North sea) are where technology created a success story, technology kept output up through the 90s at a higher plateau level than was expected and for longer than was expected.
“But the kind of downside to that is that as a consequence of technology having kept things (going) much longer than was anticipated, once they started to decline they’ve been declining much quicker.”
The data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy showed the number of barrels produced per day by the UK fell from 2,257,000 in 2003 to 2,029,000 in 2004.
The release of the figures comes as the Government announced it was offering a £40 million funding package to develop a plan to capture and store CO2 from power plants in depleted North Sea oil and gas fields.
The so-called carbon capture and storage could be in operation within a decade and could become a valuable new export opportunity, said energy minister Malcolm Wicks.
Mr Horsnell said that there were “no significant new (oil) fields to come on, some, but nothing particularly dramatic, and the net result is you’re just managing the process of decline.
He added: “That’s general throughout non-Opec (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) that mature (oil) areas are declining perhaps a bit quicker than we thought they would.”
The report revealed that the UK’s consumption of hydroelectricity increased by 26%.
The amount used, measured in tonnes of equivalent oil, rose from 1.3 million in 2003 to 1.7 million the following year.
