Aberdeen's Energy Transition Stumbles as Oil Jobs Vanish Faster Than Green Roles Appear

Iona Macdonald graduated from Aberdeen University in 2000 with a chemistry degree and did what everyone in her position did: she walked into the oil and gas industry. For twenty-five years, she built a successful career as a production chemist and later a training manager, working both onshore and offshore. The money was extraordinary. She remembers the city awash in Ferraris and Lamborghinis, the nightlife vibrant, the sense that the North Sea would keep yielding wealth indefinitely. Two years ago, she was made redundant.

Now forty-eight, Macdonald works minimum wage in a Glasgow pub. She enjoys the work and values being part of a community, but she is acutely aware that she is not using any of her skills or experience. She is not alone. She knows friends who went from six-figure salaries to stacking shelves in supermarkets overnight. The transition from oil and gas into renewables, she says, has been a struggle. It has been, in fact, a failure.

Aberdeen's predicament is not unique to one person or one moment. It is the collision between two energy systems, and the city is caught in the wreckage. Over the past decade, the UK's oil and gas workforce—roughly half of it based in Scotland—has contracted by seventy thousand workers, falling to one hundred fifteen thousand. In the same period, the renewable energy sector created only thirty-nine thousand jobs. The math is brutal. According to Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University, the oil and gas industry will shed between six hundred and eight hundred positions every month for the next five to ten years. The renewables sector is simply not ready to absorb those workers.

The North Sea itself tells the story of decline. Production peaked in 1999 at four and a half million barrels of oil equivalent per day, just as Macdonald was beginning her career. By 2024, it had fallen to just over one million. What geologists call a mature and declining basin is what Aberdeen calls home. The city has always looked to the sea—medieval trade with Scandinavia, herring fishing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—but the discovery of oil in 1969 transformed it into Europe's oil capital. That era is ending, and nothing has been built to replace it.

Politicians have been speaking for years about a "just transition," the idea of a smooth and equitable shift of labor from fossil fuels to renewables. UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has framed it as both a moral and practical duty, rooted in climate science. But the transition has not been just, and it has not been smooth. The closure of Scotland's only oil refinery at Grangemouth last year eliminated more than four hundred direct jobs and dislocated an estimated twenty-eight hundred workers in the supply chain. In February 2026, another four hundred jobs were put at risk when ExxonMobil's Mossmorran chemical works in Fife ended production. These closures have damaged faith in the very concept of a just transition. Workers, communities, and trade unions have lost hope that their skills and experience will be valued in a greener future.

The political debate has intensified as the election cycle approaches. The Scottish National Party, which has governed Scotland since 2007, once made the North Sea totemic to its independence movement—"It's Scotland's Oil" was the rallying cry in 1974. But the party has shifted. First Minister John Swinney, who joined the SNP in 1979, has softened the party's stance against new drilling licenses, though he suggests any new fields must be compatible with Scotland's net zero target for 2045. He has rebranded the slogan: "It's Scotland's Energy," pointing to wind, wave, and solar resources. Yet skepticism abounds. The Scottish Greens argue the transition should have begun decades ago. Reform UK and US President Donald Trump are calling for more drilling. The Scottish Conservatives, once supportive of net zero, have backed away. The debate is no longer about whether to transition, but how fast, and at what cost to the people caught in between.

Norway looms large in this conversation. With a similar population to Scotland, Norway took a different path after discovering oil in the North Sea. While London left investment and ownership largely in private hands, Oslo retained control of most production and invested the returns in a sovereign wealth fund. Last year, that fund generated two hundred forty-seven billion dollars in profit—roughly three times the entire Scottish government budget. Meanwhile, for the first time since 1964, the UK began no exploration wells in the North Sea while Norway started twenty-nine. The gulf between the two nations is widening, and Scottish nationalists see in Norway's success a vision of what Scotland might have been.

For Iona Macdonald, the debate feels abstract. She has no intention of returning to oil and gas. She believes the transition away from fossil fuels is necessary—there are clean alternatives, and oil is a finite resource. But she thinks the transition is being fumbled, resulting in a drain of skills and experience that will harm the economy overall. For all the politicians pronouncing on the just transition, she says, uttering slogans is easy. Delivering real change is much harder.