A 48-year-old former North Sea oil rig has been demolished as a looming tax raid on the sector leads to a slowdown in fossil fuel activity in UK waters.
The Northern Producer platform was demolished by several high explosive explosions last week due to a lack of interest.
She was landed at the port of Kishorn in Scotland for refit while awaiting redeployment last year.
However, a tax sweep on the oil and gas industry made the platform redundant.
The companies were reduce investments or leave the North Sea due to the government’s windfall tax and Labor’s threats to increase it.
The government introduced a windfall tax on oil and gas profits two years ago, which raised the marginal tax rate to 75%.
Labor wants to increase it further to 78% and has said it will ban all new oil and gas exploration in British waters. The demolition of Northern Producer coincided with the publication of Labour’s manifesto.
The proposals have prompted several companies to abandon projects in the North Sea.
Deltic Energy, run by a Labor activist, recently blamed its decision to abandon work on one of the North Sea’s most significant discoveries on “negative political rhetoric”.
The company said it gave up on the Pensacola field due to deteriorating attitudes toward the oil and gas industry amid “continued budget volatility and negative political rhetoric in the run-up to the election.” of July.”
Jersey Oil and Gas also recently told investors that work on the Buchan field would be postponed for at least a year due to political uncertainties.
In April, Harbor Energy, the North Sea’s largest producer, announced it would remove a fifth of its workforce because of the windfall profits tax.
More than 200 oil and gas wells were plugged last year, eight platforms removed and 8,000 tons of underwater structures removed from the ocean. Of the UK’s 284 oil and gas fields, a further 180 will be closed by the end of the decade.
Northern Producer was built almost half a century ago as a drilling platform before being converted to an oil and gas processing platform in 1981.
