 Welcome, everyone. My name is Ool Olsson. I'm with the Stockholm Environment Institute, SCI. I've been moderating this session. This is like a theme session around a project called Oil and Gas Transitions that we've been running for a year and a half about. It's funded by the KR Foundation and the Lowlands Foundation, and the focus is basically to develop oil and gas transition scenarios for the North Sea countries, Denmark, the UK, and Norway. The setup for today's session is basically to start with my colleague, Philippe Sanchez, from SCI, who's going to give like a set in the scene about the just transition prospects in this region. Then we'll hear the sort of short presentation, speed talks, if you like, from each of these three countries, from Kahl, from Kirsten, and from Camilla. After that, we'll have a short Q&A, particularly focusing on North Sea context. Following in that to sort of avoid us getting stuck in like North Sea naval gazing, we'll have Valerie Marcel from Chatham House who's going to give like a broader context and see how this sort of North Sea transition context relates to the broader aspect of transitions globally, especially from an emerging oil producer perspective. And with that, I just want to, I guess, invite Philippe up to give us the scene. I'm Philippe Sanchez. I am a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and I've been with the oil and gas transitions in the North Sea project since its establishment two years ago. I've mainly been focusing on the evidence for policy action amongst the North Sea producers, but also equity issues related to global phase out more broadly. And the title of my opening sort of intervention is, What Does Just Transitions Mean for Oil and Gas? And I'll be setting the scene for this panel discussion by briefly outlining what we know about how transitions work and what we mean by just transitions, followed by the role that evidence research and inclusive mechanisms can play to accelerate policy action on just transitions. And finally connecting just transitions to the North Sea region. So just to kick off, I'm probably preaching to the choir a little bit here, but of course we know that global phase out of oil and gas is undoubtedly a big shift from the status quo. What we know from the production gap report is that we're obviously on course to produce more fuels that are needed to remain on course to limit global warming. And this has been likely worsened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the history of social and technical transitions has taught us that unmanaged means bad. And for those of you familiar with the history of the UK, in the 80s, there was a huge industrial decline. And the map on the left particularly shows coal mining regions of the UK and the map on the right shows deprivation. And what we've seen is that this huge unmanaged decline has had consequences to this day in the dark blue regions, which are the most deprived in England. On the other hand, we know that the history of transitions has also given us examples of where transitions have been managed for good. And we have the picture at the bottom of the bottom left shows the webpage that you can find when you look up the Norway's sovereign wealth fund and how much money that's recouping. And I know this is a weird example to use in this case, but I'm using it as an example of a well managed transition in the sense that it avoided the resource curse. And the reason for its establishment was to avoid the resource curse, what we now call the resource curse of oil. On the right hand side, you have Denmark's North Sea agreement from 2020. And this agreement set the phase out date and cancelled the licensing round for oil and gas exploration, which shows us what the sunset of an oil and gas era can look like. And despite these examples being at opposite ends of the production curve, they both have long term visions as a common denominator. But what would make a transition away from oil and gas just as Isabel and Gaila highlighted in the plenary earlier today, there is no single definition that is set in stone. There are many conceptions of a just transition. But at their core, most conceptions seek to address the uneven spread of risks and opportunities that are inherent in socio technical transitions towards post carbon societies. In other words, they deal with issues of distributed fairness from the global low carbon transition, particularly for people and regions that now depend on fossil fuel industries. And while there are different frameworks of conceptualizing a just transition, the International Labour Organization, OECD, the EVRD that we saw earlier today, our colleagues at SCI have developed seven principles based on their analysis of industrial transitions, which we in the project have used as the anchor for our research. So I'm just going to run through them a little bit and give you a flavor. I'll just run through them and give you a little bit of a layer of what they each mean in practice for oil and gas. So the first two principles we have actively encouraged the carbonization and avoid the creation of locking or carbon locking. And by this, if we link that to oil and gas, we're talking about the setting of phase out dates, investments in clean technology, no new investments in oil and gas infrastructure. The next two principles relate to support support for affected regions, support for workers, families and communities. And if we think of what these measures look like for oil and gas, we're talking about investments in economic diversification, education, reskilling, urban regeneration. We also have a cleaning up environmental damage without socializing the cost. So this is, for example, putting the polluter pays principle in regulation, planning and decommissioning, addressing existing economic and social inequalities. And here as examples, I put the fossil fuels subsidy reform, energy efficiency measures, and finally ensure an inclusive and transparent planning process. So things like local engagement, planning and calls and consultation. And and evidence research and inclusive mechanisms can accelerate the policy action in line with the principles that I just outlined on the previous slide. They do so by providing improved understanding of complexity and uncertainty that I just then transition needs to navigate and address by bringing together diversity of perspectives and collective learning that comes with having the right stakeholders in the room. They bring aspects of procedural and also restorative fairness for vulnerable communities and marginalize voices. Mutual trust among stakeholders that comes from having respect for divergence and an appreciation for consensus. And finally, buying and democratic legitimacy for a transition. So how does this link to the North Sea? So we can think about the conditions that make the North Sea special. So we think about when we think about the North Sea, we we know that it's a mature and dwindling offshore resources. It's categorized by capital intensive exploration and extraction. And it has challenging environmental conditions. While at the same time, North Sea producers have the capacity to transition in terms of wealth, social safety nets provided by the state and access to potential alternative sources of energy. In addition, they have the governance and legal frameworks in place, trust in political institutions and constitutional democracies with traditions of popular political participation. And by bringing these things together with the leadership that North Sea producers have played on global demand reduction, it makes sense that it makes sense for North Sea regions to play a leading role in the in a just transition away from oil and gas. And I'll just finish with the words that I heard from an audience member at a panel discussion we hosted last year at COP26, which said, if North Sea producers can't set the right example, then who can? I hope this opening intervention has helped to set the scene for my fellow speakers. Thank you, Philippe. And now moving into a discussion on the three case countries, starting with Karl from Denmark. Yes, thank you. Are you going to announce the news later on? Can I say, well, because we've we've done. No, you please go on. Just to say during our intervention, we actually launched in the reports from these three countries today, so they're just coming on our website. So please go check them out. So it's a very timely way. You're at the official launch. Sorry, no, no drinks. No red carpet. Well, the carpet is kind of red, but no drinks. But you know, I just needed that because we only we only got five minutes. So I can say, please read the reports if there are any detailed questions. Yes, thank you. We have studied three countries, Denmark, UK and Norway. And this is the result of our second activity, the co-production of of scenarios to accelerate the transition away from oil and gas. My name is Karl Speerling. I'm from Olberg University, sitting in the Sustainable Energy Planning Research Group. And we have done the report together with the colleagues that you barely can see listed on the slide there. Okay, moving into the quick run through. As Philippe has mentioned, Denmark has set an end date for oil and gas phase out 2050. And I would just like to highlight that. Yes, this was done. One, to become a global leader and to show the global community that this is possible that an industrialized nation, the fourth largest oil and gas producer in the EU actually can can opt out. And it was also done to sort of link up with the rest of the green transition going on in Denmark, which is about moving out of oil and gas consumption, where the end date 2050 has been set some 10 12 years ago already. So linking up to the seven principles. Some of them have been covered quite well actually in the North Sea Agreement. And some of them, we might ask ourselves, have they been covered? Well, so it's everything going well in Denmark or what? That's what we've asked ourselves in activity to. And we actually put a question mark behind 2050 and there to ask, is this ambitious enough? Can we really set an example on being Denmark and saying 2050 as a phase out? This is how oil and gas production has been looking like. And you can see there is a there's quite a steep decline going on already. So we were wondering, what would happen if we tried and phase out earlier, let's say 2042 or 2035? Would it be such a big catastrophe for for the economy of Denmark? Could we afford it? Or would it create too much debate and problems? We looked at it purely in purely economic terms in terms of state revenue and loss of state revenue. Other issues were discussed in the report, please read it. But but we see this as a start, we want to push the discussion. We made a model where we basically had as an input production and prices. And on the other hand, the costs of operating and building infrastructure and decommissioning it. And then as an output taxation state revenue from taxation and ownership of 20% of the of the production offshore. So our baseline is the 2050 simulation, which we did in a in a Monte Carlo model, that's the gray area, which sort of shows all kinds of possibilities and possible outcomes. And where we can see the Danish ministries and energy agencies own projections in the blue curve and the purple curve and all is the black curve, which you can see follows quite well the, the official projections. What we can see is in 2042, around 2042, there's a serious decline in state income because of decommissioning costs, basically. So far so good. What happens in the other years in 2042? We can actually see that most of our biggest licenses they run out in 2042. So if we also put decommissioning there, the result is that the losses to the state would be insignificant. So it's, it's, it's fair to say that from an overall socioeconomic point of view, there wouldn't be any big problem in facing out by 2042. If we go one step further than say 2034, we would have more significant losses in the order of five billion US dollars. But if we compared it to the, to the overall state budget, we can see that this is at the level of 0.1%. So we believe at least with this figure, we can start a debate, a realistic debate of how fast can we be in Denmark? What are the implications? The oil and gas transition has been surprisingly smooth. There has not been any large debate or protests against this. The climate minister announced himself that the losses in 2050 would be in the order of 1.7 billion US dollars, or as you can see a very low share of the annual public expenditure. And another factor supporting is that we have one main oil and gas producing area that's around Esbjerg and the harbor there. But on the overall level, employment in oil and gas is fairly small in Denmark. One thing we were surprised about and discovered is that the workforce is rather versatile. So they keep moving between oil and gas and offshore renewables all the time. Right now we are in a recession in offshore renewables, so they're moving back into oil and gas. And that's that's a particular Danish thing I would say that that people working offshore are being educated to be able to work in both sectors. Yeah, simultaneously through during not this year, but during the last year's renewables have been booming. So, so there has been sort of this welfare net for for the for the for the workforce. And as back itself has been going through these changes a couple of times, they went from fishing to oil and gas and now to offshore renewables. So there's no cultural, not a strong cultural identity with oil and gas there. Yes, even political support, you might say, what would we recommend based on this for for other oil and gas producing countries? And it's difficult. I can see that it's not easy. But one thing that we that we think worked pretty well was that in 2019, the minister gathered not only the green technology industry, but also the oil and gas industry. And they created what they call 13 climate partnerships, where they where he gave them a task and said, we want to reduce CO2 emissions by 70% in 2030. How can we do it? That's your task. So please come up with solutions and make some pledges on how many megatons of CO2 you would like to reduce. At that seemed to have had an effect because the oil and gas producers were actually quite happy to be included in that discussion. Right. So based on this, the ministry also felt confident to actually announce an end date. So setting this end date is is probably the one clear and most significant signal that that you can have towards the phase out. But of course, an end date should also be set so that there's enough time for adjustment. It shouldn't be shouldn't feel too overwhelming. 2050 certainly is not overwhelming at all for Denmark in our opinion. While you do it, there should also be a discussion of how to compensate losers. And that has certainly been started in the North Sea agreement. There's been funding going into CCS and energy islands and renewable energy development offshore based on the infrastructure that is already in place in places like Aspiric. So there has been funding going into harbour expansions and things like that for for power to how to X and shipping offshore wind turbines. In the same agreement. And this is my last point. Education and reeducation has been has been key and is something that is being quite heavily debated, especially in the oil and gas producing region around around Aspiric. There's actually seems to be a lack of skilled workforce for renewables at the moment. So so so we are pre we actually might run into the opposite problem that we we don't have the problem that we cannot re employ oil and gas workers. We have too few of those skilled oil and gas workers that could carry carry on the renewable energy development. With this graphic recording from our co-production workshop, I would like to end and say thank you. My name is Camilla. I'm a researcher at Farford and Social and Labour Research Centre in Oslo. And I've been co-writing this report with a number of colleagues from the University of Oslo and multi consult. One person is actually a former MP from the energy. I mean so so co-production even on that level. I'll come back to the title where we provocatively ask if accepting a net zero pathway is a way of avoiding a face out scenario. The Norwegian oil and gas situation is very different from the Danish and it comes also from a history of a very successful transition to oil, which is also important to the cultural idea of where we come from. So in a way, how we managed oil in Norway has been a social and economic success, which also means that it's extremely significant today and therefore also challenging to move away from. So as you see there's 28% of the GDP, 20% of our state budget, 200,000 workers are related to, this depends a little bit on what statistics you use, but it's up to 6% of the workforce. So it's very significant. But it's also providing 27% of our emissions are from production. And this is specifically oil production, it's not consumption because the main consumption is from hydropower and transport is separate. There is already a projection that oil and gas will be in decline. However, that is not very strongly reflected in the public discourse. We have relatively ambitious emission targets. Also as Norway wants to be kind of a climate leader in the global setting, this is not necessarily followed with very concrete and operationalized policies. But things are happening and moving very quickly here. The general face out plan, there's no face out plan, the narrative that has settled with the current government is that we will develop not wind up. So the end date discussion is avoided by all politicians because it creates polarization and a lot of resistance. However, this development not wind up is a bit unclear. And the general idea is also there's a lot of reference to because we are the greenest, most social and most democratic production, and given the current situation with energy crisis in Europe after Ukraine, we should basically continue. However, we did this back podcasting exercise. We gathered stakeholders from policymakers from civil society that is unions and environmentalists and from the industry. And we had a two day seminar where we first discussed or ask these stakeholders to discuss concrete milestones and to get to a net zero or face out. Also discussing which actors had different responsibilities, and what kind of barriers and opportunities came along the way in order to achieve a just transition to these two hypothetical visions. And first it was extremely important to emphasize the hypothetical because the stakeholders do not embrace the visions necessarily. We also had an artist who follow the process and this is her takeaway from the two discussion. And as you see the net zero vision is relatively optimistic. People are going in the same direction. There may be some hurdles, but we're getting there. Face out not so easy. So concretely when we discuss the face out, we ask the stakeholders to relate to this visual where you see here the it's based on the statistics of Norway projection of oil production, where you see the blue line is the difference between the projection and an actual face out. And the stakeholders rather than saying how to get there, they were more concerned about the effects of that. First it's important that all of them agreed if we are getting there, we need an immediate political intervention i.e. a ban on any production by 2050. And most of the discussion beyond that was on all the problems economically and socially that would emerge from such a ban. And you see the the stapled line where they say they would fear that there would be an increase in short term production to compensate for the loss of the long term potential here. And that will also have social consequences because of the security and the tempo. And it will also bind up resources both in terms of capital and human resources in oil and therefore also hinder the development of a green transition. I'm rushing a little bit here. However, when we came to the net zero pathway, there was an agreement and a perceived kind of embracement of the vision itself. And we've seen also even the oil fund last week said that they will adhere to the net zero by 2050. So the idea to get there is relatively coherent in the Norwegian politics. And there's two defined kind of responses that needs to be. And this is the timeline used. This time is based on the IEA's projection of net zero pathways. And when it comes to the offshore wind, that means that the production to compensate for the production emissions in oil and gas, we need to electrify the installations offshore. And the idea is to roll out offshore wind quickly. The challenge here will be onshore electricity and energy crisis as we see now that this kind of rolling out windmills offshore can also disturb the electricity market. Offshore CCS needed quick to the I've tried to distinguish between what comes directly from the stakeholders and the blue is more from the research team. There's a very strong sense that this kind of exercises are useful and it needs to be very specific in to set a target and to identify milestones along the way and that has potential to be used in policy settings. However, some of the politicians are like we're in a four year cycle so that's also impossible. What we add is that there's a general need for a transformation narrative as there's a lot of popular resistance especially on the rollout of green energy like battery and windmills and there's a need for coherency and very clear and unambiguous targets in this so basically a need for operationalizing that the goals. There's also a critical point at 2030 now with the decline of oil which will also mean a decline in employment and it's insufficiently kind of used in the public. There's also this expectation of popular resistance that they acknowledge. The stakeholders emphasize the need to use the tripartite institutions that are already very strong in Norway which means that the labor organizations and that is what has happened there's a labor-defined just transition commission and what we have discussed as a research team is the danger that that is rigged to deal with social and economic issues but not ecological issues and the unions and the business are resisting having environmental actors on board so we are kind of gently saying that maybe we should open up or at least we need more and more inclusive processes beyond that specific yeah. My name is Carson Jenkins I work at the University of Edinburgh and I think it's fair to say that our presentation or our report is a bit of a Scotland UK fusion. I'm also the person responsible for suggesting that we talk for five minutes each so sorry for the rush and what I will say too is I don't think this is going to be the most uplifting presentation you've ever seen in your life so following a similar but slightly adapted format we also worked with a multi-stakeholder group to explore two scenarios which I'll explain but just to say as a little bit of UK background I think the primary thing to see at the moment are these quotes on the left hand side that overall we don't see that there's a fiscal or regulatory regime in the UK that's favoured sorry the overall fiscal and regulatory regime in the UK is favoured towards further investment and exploration in the North Sea so certainly a very difficult time to be asking these questions about doing the exact opposite. We're also very clearly saying that the UK government has neither a just transitions policy nor a governmental body committed to achieving its goals so this is language that is pushing against an established want to not hear anything about the just transition to some extent despite language popping up within the UK context particularly through the Welsh government and the Scottish government despite that there are of course ambitions to be net zero there's a complex network of production and import and export and there are some positives you might argue around emissions declining and being decoupled from economic growth but still I'm sorry I'm going to try and make it uplifting I can't not on this side but still some real policy contradictions so we're starting with a baseline where we have policy around maximising economic recovery sitting alongside ambitions for net zero and trying to work out how those might reconcile and having some fairly controversial policy measures around the North Sea or North Seal as it says North Seal transition deal that's just to uplift the mood I think which you know has been widely criticised in the way in which it was created and enacted so again a really pertinent time to be asking these questions but one in which we faced a series of challenges engaging with our stakeholders so a bit like Norway we came up with two potential scenarios and these scenarios were in the same way extremely hypothetical they were there as strawmen at discussion points to provoke but certainly not there to presuppose that any one of these futures was more desirable or to lead people into any particular policy pathway they were simply there to start our discussions so on day one we discussed what we have rather badly named the median anticipated pathway we're trying to came up with something catchy but three academics in a room really doesn't lend itself to that so the median anticipated pathway broadly speaking looked at achieving net zero through a managed decline really emphasised the need to retrain to retain some of the skills and expertise and knowledge that we have and to look as we often forget in these discussions also at demand size phase out as part of this transition and we saw this as having some positives as the energy mix diversifies and skilled labour stays with us but changes the application of what they know and what they do more provocatively on the second day we move towards what is actually well named as a rapid exit where we refer to the closure of oil and gas activities by 2050 in short order the end of domestic production and reliance on imports therefore and a variety of other things that aren't mentioned on the slide but effectively saying that this is going to happen quickly and the implications therefore would be substantial including around say 200 000 odd jobs that would very very quickly be thrown up into the air it is fair to say out of all of our discussions that we covered many many topics they were really broad really inspiring and actually really challenging but what we did find is that there was next to no consensus around the most desirable futures the most desirable pathways or the concrete courses of action and so as a team we had to sit back and think when you're trying to do these exercises is consensus still profitable or a lack of consensus still profitable and in reflection on reflection we decided to absolutely was. We also had a graphic illustrator rather than Norway having a cheerful skip towards a future I think this just you know nicely describes how complex some of these discussions were that there were many many different bits coming up that some of them were pretty pointed in terms of you know bottom left what's missing the political will and I suggest we have a commentary on that in the Q&A but we still tried as I said to bring some some sense out of this and to work collaboratively to see what was there and what could be more profitable these points much like Norway stem both from the research participants but aren't labeled to a particular organization or sector or individual and from the research team so we see that there's a need for collaborative intergovernmental relationships between Westminster and the devolved administrations waving a subtle flag for Scotland there that we need to strengthen the governance of transition processes we need to quantify and publish the estimated implications of continued oil and gas exploration appraisal and production particularly over the last couple of weeks of political change I would suggest and that we do see profitability in some of the measures that have been suggested but not yet put in place including those around a climate compatibility checkpoint test again something that might come in to bear more given everything that's happening in UK politics at the moment. One of my colleagues is a professor for carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh so this is his point I'm sure he's got investments that he's trying to bolster here but including making a firm decision around the rapid consent construction and operation of carbon capture and storage including a carbon take-back application. We also see a situation in which the nature of the labour force in the UK is highly complex and the nature of the transition that they would make in terms of skills is also highly complex there are a number of certifications that they have to put in place which although they might include for example working on an oil and gas platform and working on a wind turbine platform nonetheless mean that they have to pay more and do something subtly different even though they're fundamentally the same so we want to standardise labour force qualifications which follows a number of other stakeholders interests in that area to actively coordinate and foster participatory processes I'm sure we can talk about that as well support readiness to deploy low carbon technologies and supply chain diversification because being honest we don't see what the next step is in terms of technological readiness think about mechanisms such as Scotland's national transition training fund and so on and so forth and just look at those two points 11 and 12 to really use the language of the just transition here to clarify its stated aims and audiences and to think about what those principles might look like at a UK level and in harmony with UK devolved administrations that are already using it will be in subtly different ways thank you thank you Kirsten now so what we'll do now is we'll have a short Q&A about specifically the these presentations and then we'll let Valery give a talk so are you any questions about the situation here yep the gentleman yep yeah thanks very much for the presentations I've got three points on the UK one that's okay is there a necessity to maybe separate oil and gas because UK about 80 percent of oil is exported whereas about 40 to 50 percent of gas is used domestically so the kind of discussions about energy security and national security seem to be in the terms of oil about kind of company security and it feels like gas might be a bit of a different conversation so I wonder whether that's something to consider another point is whether public ownership is something to consider for just transitions as well although in the case of Norway it's obviously public ownership isn't necessarily going to translate into a fast just transition but I wonder in the UK context whether that's something to consider and also the renewable infrastructures a lot of the renewable infrastructure is being tied into offshore oil and gas for platform electrification and so I was just wondering about is there discussions about separating those as well so Kirsten um on the first one oil and gas separation um to be quite honest that well there's a number of different answers first is a project on oil and gas and that's that's united across all of us so you know from a research perspective we were looking both at those two things in tandem whether they were ever considered as potentially being separate in any of our research findings or discussions that we had with stakeholders no um they seem to be very much tied up albeit with different export um natures albeit tied up in a system of production and operation as far as we can see that people struggle to disaggregate whether Ukraine changes that um because we see these you know gas supply dynamics in particular is a separate question and whether things like demand side phase out um including of off grid oil fired homes changes that discussion is something to be seen so you're right that it's maybe a profitable avenue to explore public ownership did come up um in our discussions particularly around that rapid exit um but as I mentioned there was a zero consensus on that I think it's one of those things that keep on you know subtly emerging in UK politics but doesn't have enough power behind it to become a realistic option yet um and also an interesting context in which we would look back at previous transition transitions historically in the UK and say what are what were the failures of public ownership then because it's not necessarily a silver bullet which means that things are are done better and then renewable infrastructure you're right that you know there is again a muddy line between what is a fossil based system and what is a renewables one to some extent um we've I know last week the team went to the National Decommissioning Centre um based in Aberdeen where they're doing some of that research looking at um how these platforms might be reused or how new renewable technologies can be integrated um that might be part of a more median pathway um where those two things sit side by side but eventually grow apart if you know what I mean um so I'm not very personal reflection but I'm not against the the possibility that the you know renewable integration into the oil and gas sector helps us get to the overall objective which is that there isn't one long-term let's see there was yeah okay hi thank you for the presentations I have a question for Camilla or Kirsten um so in the in the context of the UK of course you have oil companies that aren't publicly held or or they're not state-owned corporations of course that are active on the UK continental shelf or in the UK context um it's mostly private companies Shell, BP but also um private equity backed ones but of course in the context of of Norway we have Equinor so I'm just wondering how does that change the picture of the political economy of phasing out oil and gas in in these two different I guess political economy context I can I can start I think the the whole question of state ownership is is interesting and should probably be seen in a historical context because we have very strong state ownership in hydropower and that was also the model for building state ownership in oil but this was in the 70s when state ownership nationalism was cool it's not anymore so even though we have two-thirds of state ownership in Equinor the idea is to have an arm length distance so and and I think it's interesting that I can't remember that the stakeholders discussed how to use Equinor as kind of a vehicle in a transition because this idea of kind of keeping an arm length and let them run their own business as business and getting into the nitty-gritty details Equinor is extremely powerful also and some would say that who who runs the show is that the Equinor or the politicians so I think the quick answer is that it does not necessarily change the political economy that it's state owned the discussion is more in the public on the state needing to intervene and invest directly in green energy Startle is moving towards but as you see I mean our projection is that oil is going down they need to to come into another section in windmill and they have windmill projects in the UK so I think that's business so maybe the the the other question is that we're seeing a reproduction it's the same act as that was in oil that also drive most of that kind of green especially the offshore green activity so does that make sense you have a final question for the North Sea context sorry okay quickly yeah yeah just to say I think it's a really interesting question which I'm the person that goes to academic conferences and opens things up and makes them hard and then you have something to think about over lunch but effectively it's it's one of boundary setting around a just transition to me we can see in the UK that although it's largely private ownership and there are companies that say British petroleum or whatever they want to call themselves they are actually referring to a global network of oil and gas skills and a global network of oil and gas dependencies and trade so whilst we say state as in we have a vested interest in protecting our own people and our own borders and our own interests the reality is that it's much bigger and messier picture which really challenges why we're working across country contexts that also has implications for therefore the responsibilities not only within our own boundaries but beyond them including the context in which we are going to increasingly import or offshore our emissions so provocative all right so I think we'll have to move now to Valerie give her intervention and if you have questions you can save them for the for the final Q&A as well thanks perhaps a bit of can you hear me should I get closer my role is a bit as a I suppose a discussant kind of looking outside in to to transitions industrialized countries I think just transitions in low-income countries and the developing world are very different it's not central government or regional governments that are engaging with that effective affected communities identifying sectors that need reskilling it's support that's not from the inside it's support from the outside from a rich country that comes to support the transition of a whole economy so it's a completely different kind of approach to to the problem and it carries a lot of complications in terms of how the support is perceived and I think it's different with higher-income producers you know that would be from the GCC for example those are not the ones I'm thinking of that can drive their own diversification program and whether it's successful or not is another issue much like in the in the North Sea sorry the GCC are the Gulf producers yes sorry Gulf producer the yes thank you and so I think the the feeling is so I'm going to make some generalizations in contrast to the great case studies that we've just had because I'm talking about the whole risk of the world but though my research is more focused on Africa and the Middle East I think the feeling is that the these countries are not getting that support for just transitions or the support that they're offered is not the one that they want that it's guided by different agendas and it's not addressing the priorities that would guide their identification of a transition path I think the it's interesting to maybe highlight the exception of the South Africa just energy transition partnership because I think that is like the holy grail of a lot of the countries that I work with would would want to see some real money on the table to to do something differently over a long process of of guiding them so I think this these these issues lead to some frustrations about climate inequity perceptions of being left behind if you don't get that support and I think perhaps it's not it's not really a participatory process in the sense that there there's not a joint you know definition of of what the process would be and that leads a lot of countries I think low-income countries to fall back on what they know which is oil and gas what's what path they do have just to maybe say a few things on what the domestic process might look like and I think what I see in in many countries that I work with is that there aren't shifting attitudes towards an alternative plan there there may be popular concerns for staying doubling down on oil and gas popular concerns for climate impacts an interesting example is Algeria where in 2017 I think it had laid out a transition plan to 2030 that included a real boost of solar power that was mostly driven to free up more gas for export because the the domestic users were using too much very subsidized gas then the Iraq revolution led to a leadership vacuum and without leadership you can't drive that kind of transition plan and then the Ukraine crisis led everybody from Europe to line up outside the minister of energy's office to you know express their interest in in doubling down on gas and investments and oil investments so the the process is a bit is somewhat derailed but not completely and I think it's not derailed completely because there's a popular expectation that they should be transitioning that they should have a plan and that they do really live like we all do in Europe with the climate impacts that that are just at an individual level but with all that I I mean I'm generalizing again but but I think what's missing is reform coalitions there are vested interests in the rent that oil and gas produce and what you can buy with that rent politically and so I think you know we were just asking about national oil companies I think our national oil companies in these countries agents of change or are they putting sticks in the wheels of change and I think that's actually a really critical issue for for finding having an ability to adapt and to think of to have those vested interests in that reform coalition change. Just quickly to maybe note a difference between established legacy producers and new producers I spoke a bit to this yesterday but the emerging producers are very very different in this in this discussion they don't have entrenched dependence they don't have fiscal dependence on the petroleum sector they are diversified so you wouldn't be talking about a decarbonization plan because they have almost no emissions it's about for them their agenda to go back to my first point would be about how to get economic growth that brings value today but builds resilience for tomorrow when the when the world is decarbonized and they have equity concerns because I think the you know what we were hearing yesterday from from Fergus about you know the new norm about establishing a new norm about no new oil and gas obviously targets them very directly and so they see a withdrawal of technical assistance and public funding for the pathway that they want to take and the problem is that it isn't accompanied with a sort of a provision for an alternative or a pathway that can get them gradually from where they are today and where they need to be tomorrow and so I think that's has some echoes with what we heard from the other cases thank you thank you Valerie I just want to take the opportunity to ask a quick question to you do you think that these sort of lessons that we heard today is that all at all relevant to the sort of the south situation or is it just you know on a completely different context well I think it is completely different but I think there are it so it is completely different for the way the conversation is taking shape but I think there will be a lot of lessons to draw on specific things like how how to handle decommissioning which I think is something we're not focusing on enough and then repurposing because there was a question in the previous panel on how feasible commercially technically is it to convert gas infrastructure to hydrogen well we'll know those answers when those when those low-income countries want to repurpose or you know we'll have a lot more more more answers I think but I think perhaps the caution would just be of transposing a process that was developed in one country or in a set of industrialized countries obviously to a low-income setting would be there's a lot of modifications to make along the way thank you thank you very much for the presentations so Steve Pye from UCL maybe first question to Carl you showed a very interesting slide that showed how smooth the the sort of move away from oil and gas or the proposed move away from oil and gas had been are some of the same industry players operating in the Denmark context that are in other country jurisdictions who are providing more resistance in other areas so it'd be great if you could reflect on that and then just a broader question across the countries was there any discussion in terms of just transitions around scope three emissions production gap report and did that influence the discussions in any way as to how stakeholders responded thank you should we respond okay yes thank you Steve so I was just I had a comment to the question public ownership which ties into your question it was curious it wasn't stated directly in any of our context to the stakeholders but what happened in 2017 2018 is that the state majority state-owned company Örsted sold their licenses to Total, Energies and the other big oil and gas producer Maersk I think the year after sold their licenses to INEOS a UK producer or it was the other way around I don't remember but and and the interesting about this is that as Denmark went from majority public ownership to majority private ownership this seemed to have opened the way for the North Sea agreement so this is the complete opposite of what we've just talked about before that you know public ownership might spur the transition and Denmark was the other way around because and again stakeholders were very reluctant to talk about this but I think it is just an economic issue because it accelerates the decline in state income then to your to question about this the industry players well Total is in the middle of it and they receive hundreds of millions in funding for developing powerjacks and offshore energy islands and electrification and CCUS so I'm not quite sure how they behave in other countries but they haven't behaved very very politely in Denmark always but but I mean the rhetoric is in place for Total at least apart from that there's a big discourse on electrification of offshore and I think that was used to sort of baits the oil and gas producers and say well you can get electrified with offshore wind and this can make your production cleaner so it was kind of a trade going on there yeah let's see Fredrik oh sorry yeah short reply to letter in scope three question three was explicitly part of the net zero vision so the actors were asked to to make a plan accordingly I don't know if it would be bulletproof but yes so and I also have another comment about later in the UK no it didn't come up we didn't get that level of granularity I think drifted off into big meta issues but not not that one well yeah in Denmark it was well in in in terms of the North Sea agreement ministerial committee actually looked into this and their conclusion was inconclusive which was good enough for the minister to go ahead hi Fredrik Bauer at Lund University so just connecting back to something that was talked about in the plenary this morning about sort of who's in the room thinking about the value chain right so both sort of suppliers and suppliers of the suppliers that are affected upstream but also downstream and they're always seeing sort of massive interests you mentioned in EOS right a chemical company buying up enormous parts of the North Sea infrastructure in both Denmark and the UK so did you in in your I mean how did you talk about the sort of changes of the value chain who is to be part of any conversation about the the transition sort of how that affects actors in the value chain both upstream and downstream you know should they be included should they be supported compensated or was it all very focused on you know those that are the oil and gas firms today you go ahead Kirsten oh I just volunteered myself um should I say quiet um it did come up um but it comes up in a number of different ways I think in the way that you've just articulated as in upstream and downstream value chains but also in terms of secondary and tertiary not oil and gas companies and I mean that by saying that obviously these systems of production and um oil and gas are happening in particular geographical contexts so if we look at the UK we've got Aberdeen you've got Shetland you've got the north of England and we were seeing discussions therefore not only about value chains that went internationally across energy infrastructure but also hoteliers and restaurant owners people in nail bars actually came up um because people don't have as much money to spend on the luxuries if you know they're going through series of boom and busts and so it refers to a much wider conceptually conceptualization of um a just transition as being place-based and also systems-based I think we also have an imaginary that we've tried to tackle really um head on that when we talk about oil and gas workers it tends to be the person then can you be a rubber suit on an oil turbine or someone working in a lab on an oil refinery platform but actually we were seeing that you know helicopter pilots are certainly part of this you've got the medics working in um different rigs and hopping about the North Sea and so there's a value chain very infrastructurally but also in terms of human capital um that has to be accounted for and when we're thinking about who the workers are we need a very diverse lens on that to make that more tangible um sitting alongside all the work that we're doing um there's a special issue um on oil and gas in the climate policy journal which looks at some of these value chain issues um and which value we're just contributing to so I welcome you looking at that Camilla uh in the exercise we explicitly invited throughout the value chain in in business and and kind of the talking point is also for the supply industry to create a value chain in ccs and windmills etc and to be part of that so so it's an explicit target and in the Norwegian discussion in general it's the supply that is the hub of employment and that are more vulnerable short term and they say they need someone to ask for and demand green issues and that's where also they want the state to to invest so it was very much there but my last point that I didn't say was the the frustration of the stakeholders of setting this as a national debate within Norway that it it doesn't make sense because it's a market that kind of goes up from a Norwegian perspective that generally means that we have gas and you want it so we should continue but it also doesn't relate to stakeholders and I missed that a little bit in your intervention because I I think what is interesting here is to identify and and different stakeholders and have a conversation with them but that can also go across countries and meeting with these it's it's like for me I'm a labor researcher having workers talking across but also identifying that these value chains are going across countries not only in the North Sea but down to the Global South and a lot of the key stakeholders in Norway have investment and operations in Nigeria in Brazil etc etc and I think that there's kind of a need for that conversation and also linking stakeholders across countries and also breaking down the kind of national state talk but seeing how and and there are attempts in labor to do that and the the the global companies do that all the time not necessarily publicly so yeah just I remember seeing in the map yesterday was a presentation about Guyana and Equinor was prominently featured in Karl yeah I think it's a very good question I I mean the closest to including the whole value chain that that happened in Denmark was through the climate partnerships actually in 2019 so that was like a but that was the complete energy producing using converting industry that was collected in these 13 I would just like to mention one example that that I think was is quite interesting it's a smaller supplier from SBIR SEMCO maritime and they sort of illustrate this versatility quite well because they are both in oil and gas and an offshore wind so what happens is that they progressively move more towards offshore wind but they also have this sort of welfare model where they say well retiring oil and gas workers can sit at the office and you know work a little bit on offshore wind we don't fire them because just keep them in the company so so there's this sort of integrated model which is interesting because they are local and I think you wouldn't see the same with a with a maybe more global supply company and what they did note though is that the effect on small workshops smaller welders below 10 employees and so on that that would that would be more pronounced because they don't have the same flexibility but the extent of it is still unknown actually so we'll have to see so I have one question for Camilla on the Norwegian I'm Gudi Bang by the way from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences so it's related to what you were talking about the workforce and you mentioned specifically this strong role in Norway for tripartite negotiations and so I was wondering whether you could sort of reflect on this emerging rift that we see within the labor movement in Norway with the labor organization LO in sort of a state where there are conflicting coalitions on this topic of supply side climate policies and whether that's the case also in perhaps in Denmark I don't know it's not so much in UK I would guess but yeah thank you thank you for a very big question um yeah that's kind of background the the oil workers unions in Norway are very powerful but there are a minority within the workforce so even though they're but within the union movement or the LO which is the kind of the biggest confederation there has been a history of having issue ownership so an LO is a very political union and they have political decisions in their congresses so on industrial politics industrial unions have had the final say however on climate change public unions and and trades union come in and have different perspectives and and also claim ownership to climate change in a way that challenges this idea of issue ownership so I think this has peaked the last 10 years in the the three congresses 2017 was particularly difficult whether industries even said they would leave if public unions stood on their decision to protect the area around Lofoten but it ended up in in in a compromise I think there has been internal discussions between industries and and public sector unions the public sector unions have toned down their their climate engagement is my impression whereas the industry unions and specifically the ones that David and I have been talking to in 2017 they were seeing red literally when anyone said an end date to to oil and and said they didn't want to explore more when you talk to them now they describe that they are in a green transition so so it's more of a current reality than an abstract future uh so so now it's more discussion how that transition will go than to avoid it so I think there's a change in the in on both sides of the but it's there and it's it's it's a challenge and I think the the power of the union is still on the industry side and yeah I think that's the very old let's see a final question here maybe nice hi um Felix from ETH Surik I have a question relating to your presentation Carl you were talking about how there's a large transferability and also transfer between workers in the oil and gas sector and other sectors be it renewables or fishing and it seemed that in the context of the other two case studies Norway and and the UK and Scotland but that was not the case and there's this large question right of how transferable are these skillsets be it from coal to solar or from offshore oil and gas to offshore wind and I'm wondering what what do you guys think are the factors shaping uh well either inhibiting this transfer or uh promoting this transfer of those skillsets be it institutional or or others yeah thanks I can start um so we talk to the labor union that um that is sort of the umbrella for I think the best translation would be maritime engineers and that's I found out afterwards that seems to be a very specifically Danish education it's it's um it's sort of a applied college application so it's quite specialized but but also rather academic and in that in that that education simply makes sure that that that the engineers the maritime engineers have the skillsets to be used very flexibly in all sorts of engineering jobs I mean some of them become consultants some of them work offshore on the platforms some of them do a substation design and so on and so forth so so that's that that seemed to have been targeted at development at the at the applied sciences colleges around Denmark okay can I just interfere to see if the person can can add something to that as well is this we have two minutes to lunch and you want us to be quick yeah you're interpreting me correctly yeah um how transferable the skillsets is a really interesting question and if you look at the work that my phd student will publish in three years in scotland she'll tell you um there are a number of um different things that are worth saying just to again open up some questions we often think that people are going to move from platforms to renewable production what about the demand side um particularly in terms of retrofit in the uk and you know the integration of heat pumps etc but also what about the potential that they don't move into the energy sector and that we develop new economies and new um new technological options that aren't around this and I have a another student that's done that in Louisiana and said you'll know if they might imagine an oil and gas phase out they don't imagine a renewable future it might be something altogether so there's a whole bunch of normative assumptions that we're putting in place that might not stand true let me just say quickly there is a class issue going on here lower skilled workers are more in trouble than engineers and it's a question of either way you need training who's paying for that training and what kind of guarantees do you have for social welfare etc so so the issue is there and I think the biggest issue is the uncertainty or whatever this other is it's two workers it's it's not concrete and in Scotland they complain that the green comes with more precarious work and lower work conditions thank you I just want to finish by acknowledging our project leader Adriana Chavarilla who's been doing a lot of work putting together a session as well and with that I just want to thank you for coming and let's go for lunch