President Trump is visiting Scotland this weekend, spending time at two of his golf clubs, and attending a ribbon-cutting of a new course at one of them. He is also scheduled to meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Aberdeen.
Aberdeen, known as The Granite City from the locally quarried stone used in many of its finest buildings, has built its economy on the oil and gas industry, though it’s now a city in transition.
“They have so much oil there,” President Trump told a reporter in a recent phone interview with BBC News, and the vast oil fields in the nearby North Sea have led to Aberdeen being dubbed ‘Europe’s Oil Capital”.
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When BP struck black gold deep under the notoriously rough waters of the North Sea in the early 1970s, it heralded a period of economic growth for Aberdeen, which until then had been more famous as the home of Scotland’s fishing fleet.
The first oil field to be tapped was the Forties Field, more than a hundred miles offshore. It had an estimated two billion barrels of oil, and by the peak of its production in 1979 was producing half a million barrels every day.
Over the following decades, some of the biggest names in the industry, including Shell, Esso, ConocoPhillips, Mobil and Statoil, established drilling or pipeline operations with Aberdeen as their hubs, as the North Sea became dotted with hundreds of oil rigs, and the industry generated an estimated 100,000 jobs.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the North Sea oil and gas industry became a major driver of the U.K. economy, and propelled Britain at one point to become the world’s fifth-largest oil producer. The success of Aberdeen was a source of national pride, too.
“It was our friends the Americans who went to the moon and returned with honor,” former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told a meeting of petroleum industry executives in the mid-1980s, “but here in Britain, in the North Sea, the oil industry has been to the bottom of the deep and has won not only honor but oil.”
Modern-day Aberdeen is a city going through generational change: oil and gas production has fallen by 5% every year since the turn of the millennium, and hundreds of oil wells have been decommissioned.
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There’s a sometimes reluctant acknowledgment in Scotland’s northeast that oil and gas resources are finite, and the area is coming to terms with a green economy transition that will not provide new jobs for everyone currently working in the petroleum industry.
Ahead of his visit to Scotland, President Trump called for more North Sea drilling and criticized the U.K.’s shift to renewable energy sources.
Upon his arrival on Friday, Trump echoed his criticism of renewable energy. “Stop the windmills. You’re ruining your countries. I really mean it. It’s so sad. You fly over, and you see these windmills all over the place, ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds,”he told reporters.
This will be music to the ears of oil industry executives, with their deep roots in the Aberdeen economy, and their deep pockets that keep a pro-oil and gas agenda in the headlines. They’ve been lobbying hard for the British government to drop a 78% tax on their profits, and pushing for more drilling licenses.
However, more fossil fuel production would be incompatible with the U.K.’s international climate commitments and a goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C. The city of Aberdeen also has its own climate targets, aiming to be net-zero by 2045.
President Trump’s opposition to renewable energy projects in Aberdeen is well documented. He previously fought and lost a lengthy court battle to block the construction of a wind farm not far from the shoreline of his golf course.
He claimed that the eleven turbines would spoil the view from the links, but in 2019 a Scottish court ruled against him and ordered Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd to pay the legal bills of the Scottish government as part of the judgment.
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