The UK’s green energy transition runs on oil and gas workers – Westminster’s rhetoric is driving them away

The welders, engineers, geoscientists and subsea specialists the UK needs to build its wind farms and nuclear stations are, overwhelmingly, the same people currently working in North Sea oil and gas. And the government, through the language it uses about their industry, is giving them every reason to leave.

That was the conclusion drawn by the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee after a visit to Aberdeen in early July 2026 to hear first-hand about the challenges facing the industry.

Committee Chair Bill Esterson said the government needed to make the pragmatic case for oil and gas – giving industry the certainty it needs to deliver the transition, and climate campaigners the certainty that the UK will play its full part in fighting climate change.

“Language matters,” Esterson said, twice, in a statement that was less about policy than about narrative. “The government needs to become more assertive, to focus its language on the projects it will deliver and how the workers currently in oil and gas will transition into delivering energy for the future.”

The dirty truth

The most notable piece of evidence the committee gathered was not about tax rates or licensing rounds, but language.

Both employers and trade unions told the committee they wanted greater certainty for oil and gas production in the North Sea, and called for a shift away from describing jobs as clean or dirty. Government is effectively telling 200,000 people whose livelihoods depend on the UK Continental Shelf that their work is the problem.

This is simply not how energy transitions happen – no matter how quickly and ambitiously we push for a green Britain.

The Climate Change Committee, the government’s own statutory adviser, told MPs that oil and gas would be part of credible plans to deliver the transition. Domestic production supplies nearly half of the UK’s gas. And the supply chains that keep that gas flowing are the same ones expected to install offshore turbines, lay subsea cables and service a growing nuclear fleet.

Treat those workers as legacy assets to be wound down, the committee’s argument runs, and they will not wait around to be redeployed.

Instead, they will go where the work is and where the political messaging is friendlier.

Esterson pointed to the pragmatic approaches to energy policy taken in Canada, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, all of which have managed to pursue decarbonisation without rhetorically disowning their hydrocarbon workforces.

Rosebank, Jackdaw and the certainty problem

The committee is clear that the government needs to provide certainty about the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, and deliver early on the new tax regime agreed with the Treasury.

The Oil and Gas Price Mechanism would, in its view, shore up not just oil and gas but the economic and skills base underpinning wind, solar and nuclear.

Esterson said evidence provided to the committee indicated that approving Rosebank and Jackdaw would have wider benefits for the entire energy sector, and that the case for a change in policy had grown “increasingly compelling” to MPs who made the trip to Aberdeen.

The Energy Secretary has always maintained that oil and gas will play a role in UK energy up to and beyond 2050. But the committee’s intervention suggests that position has not landed with industry, with unions, or with the public.

Esterson said evidence heard by the committee suggested that “regardless of who has what job, a change of approach may be needed by the government”, a pointed note to the government’s top team as Andy Burnham prepares to take power.

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