The net zero transition is usually talked about in gigawatts, carbon and investment. But behind all of that are thousands of people whose careers were built around oil and gas and who are now being told they can simply move into renewables.
Dr Kirsty Denyer from Henley Business School has spent four years studying what that transition actually feels like for UK oil and gas workers. Her conclusion is uncomfortable: the promise of a smooth move into clean energy jobs is not matching reality.
Kirsty told me “There’s a sort of assumption in this energy transition that we’re going to get all the oil and gas workers and transition them all over to renewable energy jobs kind of passively and that’s all going to happen really smoothly. We embarked on the study because that clearly wasn’t happening.”
She spoke to 37 people across the sector including 24 workers who had experienced job loss and 13 industry stakeholders. What she found was a workforce dealing with unemployment, uncertainty and in some cases taking jobs far below their skill and pay levels just to keep going.
“During a downturn or somebody is unemployed there’s a trend of taking underemployment,” she told me. “You’ve got these extremely highly skilled people taking that underemployment to plug a bit of a financial hole as a distraction because an indefinite period of unemployment is really, really dire.”
Perhaps the most surprising part was the difficulty some workers faced trying to enter renewables at all. Kirsty said “Workers feel stigmatised by the industries both by renewable energies and by other employers. Everybody’s saying that our skills are useful for renewables but actually we’re seeing it’s the dirty cousins. We’re not wanted there because we’re the kind of polluting industry.”
And there is another problem nobody talks about enough. Some people simply do not want to change careers.
“I had a couple of older workers saying, no offence, but I’ve done enough retraining. I’m so highly skilled and so highly trained. I’ve done my whole career. I’m done. I don’t want to retrain now.
“Some people, their whole identity was in oil and gas. Changing is really not that simple. It’s kind of giving up your career, your identity.”
That is why Kirsty believes a genuinely just transition has to mean more than offering a training course. It needs equivalent pay, proper job security, meaningful work and the freedom for workers to make their own choices.
Her message is simple. “Here is a body of workers that have helped the UK economy so much. They dedicate their lives, their careers and education to it. Let’s help them access something else. Let’s not forget them.”
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