BP Exits the North Sea as Ardersier Sits Empty: Where has London Rule left Scotland’s Just Transition?

Scotland is facing a double blow to its energy sector. BP has announced a formal process to market its entire Aberdeen-based North Sea business - ending six decades of pioneering oil and gas production in the basin as part of a global portfolio strategy. Where is the transition? Where are the replacement jobs for North East workers?

BP’s exit is not an isolated event. North Sea oil and gas jobs have been disappearing for years. These workers were promised a transition into renewable energy jobs and these jobs have not materialised. BP’s Aberdeen-based North Sea business still employs around 1,100 people, with thousands more dependent on the wider supply chain. The decline of oil and gas was foreseeable, yet successive UK Governments have failed to plan for it, allowing jobs to disappear without building the replacement renewable industries Scotland was promised. BP’s exit is another warning that the old and gas industry is retreating faster than the promised transition to renewables is being built and Aberdeen and the North East of Scotland are facing the brunt of it.

Meanwhile Ardersier - the historic port at the mouth of the Cromarty Firth which once employed thousands in oil-related construction - lies largely empty. The site was supposed to represent the dawn of a massive green revival. The world’s largest wind turbine plant was due to be built there - a huge deal that took the Scottish government years of hard work to win. It was the Highlands' biggest regeneration project. But a £1.5 billion investment from Chinese offshore wind manufacturer Ming Yang was killed off on vague "national security" grounds by the UK Labour government - despite many other more sensitive projects going ahead in England with Chinese companies. 

Ardersier is a symbol of a broken transition strategy dictated from London - another chapter in the sorry tale of how the UK has mismanaged Scotland's energy potential. 

The loss of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory is creating wider issues. The Crown Estate Scotland recently downgraded its estimate of local supply chain spend from ScotWind projects from 36% to below 30% - a £6 billion loss for local suppliers and communities. 

Rather than capturing the lucrative turbine, blade, and supply chain manufacturing at home, Scotland is once again being reduced to an exporter of raw natural resources and an importer of value-added technology which is built elsewhere.

The contrast could not be starker for Scottish workers. As oil and gas supermajors pack up and shift capital to higher-yield overseas basins, the long-promised "Just Transition" is evaporating before our eyes. Instead of replacing fossil fuel extraction with high-value renewable manufacturing, Scotland is being left with neither.

The FT reported that a part of the problem for Scotland’s transition is the unfair privatised energy transmission system which boosts development in England while penalising that in Scotland: “The promise of manufacturing and operational contracts is not materialising at the pace previously expected as offshore wind projects in northern Scotland struggle to progress. Business leaders  blame the competitive disadvantage of UK transmission charges that encourage generation closer to English centres of demand.”

The Chinese firm Ming Yang, which was proposing to build the world’s largest wind turbine at Ardersier near Inverness in the Highlands, is looking at options in Europe.

The UK Labour government blocked the plan - undercutting long years of hard work by the Scottish government to win the £1.5 billion, which would have been the Highlands' biggest regeneration project. 

There are a couple of small projects going on at the yard, for example the trial of an innovative mooring system called Squid. That is to be welcomed of course but it will provide only a small fraction of the jobs. There is nothing on the horizon to replace Ming Yang.

Westminster played its security card to kill the deal  - and the conversation

Westminster said they killed the Ming Yang deal because of “national security”. That is a card they can play whenever they like without explanation - because it is a power reserved to Westminster. 

Like kids in the playground taking their ball away, the UK government stopped the Highlands’ biggest regeneration project without even having to say why.

The UK government sat on the deal in surly silence for 18 months, refusing to discuss mitigation of their concerns with the Ming Yang team. Then, just as Holyrood rose for election recess, citing vague "national security" grounds regarding Chinese technology in the energy grid, the UK Government abruptly declared it "cannot support" the use of Ming Yang turbines.

Now Reuters has reported that Ming Yang’s CEO, Horatio Evans, is in active talks with the Spanish government about building the factory there. 

The "Security" Smokescreen and UK hypocrisy

The execution of the decision exposed a total lack of both respect for Scottish devolution and transparency. First Minister John Swinney noted that the UK government was effectively “sabotaging Scotland's industrial future.” 

Westminster completely failed to address its own glaring hypocrisy. Swinney  slammed the veto as an “anti-Scottish move,” pointing out that Westminster continues to embrace Chinese state-backed investment in English infrastructure, with projects such as:

• China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN)—a state-owned enterprise directly controlled by the Chinese government owns a 23% equity stake in Hinkley Point C nuclear power station  

• Westminster pushed the approval of a massive Chinese "super-embassy" in the heart of London through, explicitly overriding local council rejections and ignoring warnings from MI5 and GCHQ that the site poses unmitigable espionage and national security risks

• The China Investment Corporation (CIC), which is China’s official, state-owned sovereign wealth fund, owns a 10% equity stake in Heathrow Airport Holdings. 

• The China Investment Corporation (CIC) holds a major stake in Cadent Gas, the UK’s largest gas distribution network.

• The Minety battery storage project in Wiltshire is one of the largest grid-scale battery facilities in Europe. It is funded, built, and operated by China Huaneng Group (a massive Chinese state-owned power company) alongside the CNIC, a Chinese government-backed investment fund.

• The China Investment Corporation (CIC) - China’s state-owned sovereign wealth fund - owns an 8.7% equity stake in the parent company of Thames Water.

Yet a wind turbine factory in the Highlands poses an unmanageable threat to national security?

No evidence for Westminster’s “security” call

Ming Yang Europe's CEO, Horatio Evers, has also completely dismantled the security scare, noting that the firm designed its setup to be fully aligned with robust cyber regulations. Evers clarified that “there is no risk to energy systems” and that neither Ming Yang nor any third party could remotely shut down wind farms or disrupt the grid.

Yet Westminster rejected the safeguards anyway, letting the decision sit on their desks for 18 months before dropping the axe precisely as the Scottish Parliament rose for election recess.

The background

Ardersier sits at the mouth of the Cromarty Firth, within the Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport. This industrial site was a hub of the oil platform industry in the 70s and 80s, where thousands of skilled workers built massive structures. 

Its reincarnation as an Energy Transition Zone was backed by a hard-fought £50 million from the Scottish Government’s Scottish Investment Bank, alongside matching funds from the UK Infrastructure Bank. 

Landing the Ming Yang deal to make the transition was not an overnight fluke; it was the culmination of a years-long diplomatic effort to secure what would have been the world's largest wind turbine manufacturing facility.The yard was cleared, the groundwork was laid, and a full offshore wind manufacturing ecosystem - building turbine blades, nacelles, and floating wind components domestically - was within grasp.

Scotland is already central to Europe’s offshore wind ambitions. We have the coastline, the seabed, the engineering heritage and the renewable resources. Yet Scotland repeatedly fails to capture the manufacturing and long-term industrial benefits associated with that energy boom. Too often, the infrastructure is built elsewhere while Scotland provides the raw resource. The world’s largest wind turbine to be built at Ardersier looked like a chance to change that. 

Then Westminster intervened.

From the McCrone Report to Renewables: A Pattern of Suppression

To understand why Westminster blocked Ardersier, closed Grangemouth and Mossmoran and betrayed the North East's oil and gas workers, you have to look past the immediate excuses and look at the history of the British state. This isn't new; it is a continuation of a decades-old structural strategy.

In 1974, the UK government received The McCrone Report. Written by the brilliant economist Gavin McCrone, the document explicitly concluded that the discovery of North Sea oil would make an independent Scotland incredibly wealthy, giving it a currency "as strong as the Swiss franc" and an embarrassingly large financial surplus.

What did Westminster do? They didn't celebrate Scotland's economic fortune. Instead, they classified the report and hid it from the Scottish public for thirty years. They systematically downplayed Scotland's economic viability to manufacture a narrative of dependency, using Scottish oil wealth to fund tax cuts and regeneration projects in London and the south of England while letting Scotland's heavy industries rust.

Westminster’s sabotage of Scotland

The sabotage of Ardersier is the modern equivalent of burying the McCrone Report. There is simply no desire inside the British state to foster a Scotland that appears economically autonomous, industrially self-sufficient, or capable of leading Europe’s green energy boom.

If Scotland successfully captures the entire manufacturing supply chain of the renewables era, the unionist myth that Scotland is "too poor" to survive independently collapses entirely.

Westminster wants to hold onto its power. They do not want Holyrood politicians to venture into the territory of doing deals with international companies, bringing investment and jobs home. That kind of activity takes Scotland ever closer to independence. 

A Structural Failure, Not a Coincidence

Experts like those at the Energy Transition Unit at Robert Gordon’s University in Aberdeen have long called for a whole sector approach to managing Scotland’s energy resources. They were part of the effort to persuade the former Chancellor Rachel Reeves to adopt a tax framework that would have encouraged big players to stay in Aberdeen and be part of the transition. 

These pleas fell on deaf ears. Now BP is packing its bags at the same time as Ardersier lies empty. 

There are renewed hopes with the change of Labour PM to Andy Burnham that there could be a change of heart. That is unlikely. Scotland’s position is one of holding little electoral clout within a UK that pursues an extractive model towards Scotland’s resources. 

Only with independence can Scotland protect its economic assets, secure its green industrial future, control its own vast natural wealth, and ensure that Scottish jobs and economic prosperity are never again sacrificed to serve the political interests of a London parliament.