Interview: Andrew Thomson
In this interview with Andrew Thomson, a Scottish seasoned professional in the energy sector, we delve into the multifaceted landscape of oil, renewable energy, and their global implications through a personal lens.
Andrew shares his journey from working in the oil industry over 20 years to recently transitioning into nuclear and wind energy sectors. Through his experiences, he provides insights into the socioeconomic impact of oil, the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy, and the complexities of global politics that intertwine with the energy sector.
Exploring Andrew's experiences working offshore in locations like Nigeria and Azerbaijan, the discussion uncovers the substantial influence of hydrocarbons and the cultural, socio-economic, and safety developments within the oil sector.
The discussion delves into the critical role of energy across modern life, impacting everything from education to communication, while critiquing governmental actions on energy policies and advocating for a balanced energy strategy, similar to Japan's where currently works in setting up Wind Turbine Platforms (using much of the same technology as oil rigs).
Furthermore, the dialogue highlights the philosophical and challenging practical shifts toward renewables, exploring political and economic challenges in this transition.
Through Andrew's perspective, one can try to better attempt to begin to understand the global energy politics, the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches in energy careers, and the shifting dynamics in the energy sector.
Time Stamps
00:00 The Importance of Energy in Modern Life
01:00 Introducing Andrew: From Oil to Climate-Friendly Energy
01:46 Andrew's Background and Career Journey
02:38 Life and Work in the Oil Industry
07:34 Challenges and Dangers of Offshore Drilling
10:54 The Culture and Lifestyle of Oil Workers
20:58 Global Perspectives: Working in Africa and Beyond
23:58 Corruption and Local Interactions in the Oil Industry
38:09 A Costly Mistake and Cultural Reflections
38:54 Corruption and Anti-Corruption Measures
40:09 Cultural Differences and Acceptance
41:13 Colonial Legacy and Historical Perspectives
43:41 Nationalized vs. Private Oil Companies
45:46 Transition to Renewable Energy in Japan
46:12 Challenges in the Oil Industry
48:22 Geopolitics and Energy Policies
56:43 Experiences with Government Agencies
01:03:56 Future Prospects and Peak Oil Debate
01:08:06 Final Thoughts on Energy and Policy
Highlights and Quotes of Interest
On Energy Source Mixes
Japan has a long term vision.
It has a vision of a percentage mix of nuclear fossil fuels, renewables, whereas I feel like I'm fairly against it in my home country, in the UK, because we don't have a long term plan. We've had four prime ministers in the last two years. One of them wanted to build eight nuclear power stations, the next one to start fracking.
I believe in an energy mix. I think there's a lot of irresponsibility talked about these days in terms of the energy transition. I do think there should be an energy mix.
And then the one now wants to quadruple our offshore wind capacity in eight years, which is impossible. It's quite nonsensical. It's quite short term thinking. I'm not anti wind, I'm not pro oil, I'm not anti or pro any, anything. What I'm pro is a science based, long term, non subsidy, non corruption based market solution.
On Incentives in Oil Vs “Renewables”
So right now, it seems like oil is completely negative and then offshore wind is completely positive. You look at the motivations behind companies putting in offshore wind turbines or the service companies exactly the same as motivations behind all companies.
Neither one is doing them. For anything other than to make money. And I think it's simplistic and a little bit silly to think that the boss of an oil company is some sort of J. R. Ewing, person that likes to run over puppies on the way home and the boss of an electricity company or a turbine installation company or whatever is some sort of, sandal wearing saint that doesn't care about money. Everyone in pretty much, I would say any corporation, that statistic about men are CEOs, they're psychopaths. All they care about is money. And I think there are a lot of like there's a lot of talk about subsidies in [renewables]
On Oil’s Beastly Nature
It only takes, one ignition source and then you're on top of a fireball…potential that the entire thing can blow up underneath your feet.
On Life without Oil
It's the world we have is impossible to have without oil. Sure. You can reduce it. It's going to run out eventually one day anyway.
So reducing it is not a bad thing, but to pretend that you can just press stop and then you can put in a wind turbine is nonsensical. And the politicians know it's nonsensical as well.
The sheer scale of, Hydrocarbon involvement in our modern industrial life is so incredibly difficult to untangle.
There's literally nothing more important than our energy because it ties into the availability of education and medicine and travel and communication. Right, without. some form of mass energy production. We're right back to the medieval ages.
On The British State
I speak from a very UK point of view because it's my country, it's my home. I feel As ever, the British state works against the British people, not for the British people, which is a contrast to some of the countries that we may look down our noses on a little bit more as not developed, where, and Japan is a great example of this, where Japan seems to do things for the benefit of Japanese people, which seems to be a controversial idea back home.
Learning from Travel
This is part of, traveling. You see so many countries where people are so proud of their country. Nigerians were some of the most proud people I think I've ever met, and it's the same in Japan. And I worry the direction our country's going, both the UK and the US, when we were raising a generation of children who are being taught to be embarrassed by where they come from. Though I really feel like in the West we've made a mistake over the years in trying to impose our way of looking at the world on other cultures.
Post Interview Notes / Links from Andrew
Here are some relevant links that might be of interest:
"Empire of Dust", a fascinating documentary widely referenced online, but with no major release I don't think, that shows interaction between a Chinese contractor and locals in the DRC. It's a perfect example of culture clash, the strength in the documentary being there is no western-style narrative, it's simply two very different cultures interacting honestly with each other. The film-maker is Belgian which is particularly interesting given their colonial history in the DRC.
Watch @ https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5gdfm4
I can particularly recommend Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness if you're interested in the dark side of colonialism, or any history of DRC or Zaire as it was. One of my favourite films is Apocalypse Now, which along with the book perfectly makes the point I was trying to, which is how these cultures are manifestly different from ours, and any attempt to convert or run these societies in a western way will ultimately end up in failure, unless it's done by complete dominance, which of course, is wrong. It's a subject I find really interesting, and my experiences in Africa really changed how I view the world.
On Energy Prices “Strike Prices” and Renewables
Some links explaining the Strike Price for electricity set through the CfD (Contract for Difference) mechanism that guarantees a specific rate for electricity to renewables companies.
https://www.iea.org/policies/5731-contract-for-difference-cfd
https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/cfds_explainer/
It's quite hard to find a non-biased article explaining this, but the basic mechanism is:
What isn't always mentioned is the "top-up" when the price falls is paid to the generators by the consumer, in the UK at least, in the form of a levy on the electricity price. Which is fine in theory to have a set electricity price, but currently the UK has the 3rd highest electricity costs in the world:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country
On British Embassy Support (Weapons:Yes / Hydrocarbons: No)
UK government ending support for oil and gas sector abroad:
But no issue promoting UK weapons manufacturers:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/15/uk-spent-1-3m-on-security-for-worlds-biggest-weapons-fair
Subsidies provided to the oil and gas industry in the US: (this can be complicated to assess because the IMF considers environmental and health costs after production as an effective subsidy, whereas the OECD and the IEA do not)
Correction on Refinery Capacity in Nigeria
I was slightly mistaken, there is some refinery capacity in Nigeria, in fact it's the highest in all of Africa, however it is still around half of what Houston alone produces per day.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13203-018-0211-z
On Oil Piracy / Theft (Discussed During Interview as Another Source for Danger / Volatility / Environmental Damage)
Oil pipeline theft still seems to be a problem in Nigeria sadly:
On Working in the Pubic Sector
I was thinking about one of your last questions afterwards, whether I'd ever work for the government. You know, I would actually love it, to be able to make some type of positive impact, I'd really enjoy that much more than my current job, it's just that what I would advocate is so far in the opposite direction of the UK foreign office and civil service's ethos (non-judgmental promotion of UK interest and people without imposing change on other countries) that I wouldn't get the opportunity. The British sitcom "Yes Minister" captures perfectly how the UK establishment works, it's from the 80s but still very relevant. It works to ensure the continued existence of the establishment, not the general population.
AI Machine Transcription - Enjoy the Glitches!
Andrew: The sheer scale of, Hydrocarbon involvement in our modern industrial life is so incredibly difficult to untangle.
There's literally nothing more important than our energy because it ties into the availability of education and medicine and travel and communication. Right, without. some form of mass energy production. We're right back to the medieval ages.
Leafbox: Andrew, thanks so much for making time for me. I know you're a busy guy. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Actually, when I first met you, I was actually fascinated with your work because you're one of the few people I know who has jumped from the oil sector to a climate friendly energy sector, I call it, so I was very curious about your perspectives on both. Having, your wife told me that you lived in Baku and that alone, it is probably a book's worth of questions. Andrew, why don't we just start tell us who you are, where you are, what's the weather like in Fukuoka? And where are you from?
Andrew: Well, the most important thing the seasons in Japan seem to follow rules like the rest of Japan. So it's got the memo recently that it's not summer anymore, which is great because summers here are pretty brutal. And it's cloudy and rainy, which from someone from Scotland is nice and familiar.
Yeah, I guess be brief biography. I'm Scottish from the North of Scotland. This is usually the point where someone says, well, you don't sound Scottish, but that's because I was born down in England. But moved up Scott, two parents from very remote rural part of Scotland. And we moved up when I was about six.
So I went to the local university Aberdeen which at the time was the oil capital of Europe. So with a passion for engineering and a desire to Just have adventure really as a young guy wanting to see the world. Also oil is always historically been very well paid. Probably along the lines of, I don't know, market wise, your career options, lawyer, doctor, that sort of thing, which was never really my interest in an oil worker.
So anyway financial motivations, adventure motivations, just an interest in big, heavy engineering pushed me in that direction. I joined, graduated, I took a master's in offshore engineering graduated and joined Halliburton about six weeks before 9 11. So this was in the year of of Dick Cheney, of course then I eventually ended up working offshore.
For a company that worked on drilling rigs, doing directional surveys, so you would run drilling tools down the well and that was quite life changing, really very exciting. A lot of. Pressure. This is all gonna make me sound very old, but pre smartphone days. So you were a lot more on your own in those days.
I did that for four years. Then I ended up running operations in Lagos, Nigeria. Did that for three years, joined a Norwegian company, worked for them in Aberdeen, and then again, oil service. And ended up running their operations in Baku and Azerbaijan. Then COVID came along and like for a lot of people turned the world upside down.
So with the low oil price ended up being made redundant and Really struggled for about a year or so to find work and then it wasn't ideological either one way or another in terms of the energy transition, it's quite heavily marketed these days but I'm not overly convinced that it's as easy as politicians seem to say it is but I took a job for a company drilling offshore foundations.
And I was working on a nuclear power station, the cooling shafts for a nuclear power station. And then I simply got a job offer one day an online recruiter to come to Japan to work on offshore wind which has some, Close. It's basically the same things I was doing, except it was in nuclear.
So yeah, none of it's been a straight line or a plan, but just the opportunity came up. We really wanted to have another period abroad. So we took the move and then I find myself on a beach speaking to yourself after about a year or so.
Leafbox: So Andrew, going back to university time, exactly what did you study? Was this petroleum engineering? Or
Andrew: It was no, it was mechanical engineering. But being in it was Robert Gordon university in Aberdeen, but being in Aberdeen, it was very heavily oil influenced at the time. I was actually. obsessed with cars and motorbikes, anything with an engine. So I really wanted to do automotive, but I didn't have the grades to go to a lot of the bigger universities down South.
And I was 16 when I went to university and didn't really want to go too far. So I did mechanical. And then that led on to a degree in offshore engineering at the same university, which was completely oil focused.
Leafbox: And then Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about the makeup of, the demographics of when you entered the oil industry and especially in Scotland and what were these offshore platforms like, you have engineers with high degrees and then what about the workers themselves?
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. So, your average rig is made up of a lot of different job functions. At the top or guess with the most responsibility. So you've got your company that own the rig. They're the drilling contractor and they have their personnel the guy that manages the rig, and then they have all different personnel, including all the deck crew and all the roughnecks raised about, but then you have the oil company that contracts them.
And they have someone offshore running it, but they have a lot of engineers. And then you have all these like service companies, which is what I've worked for that come in and do things. So you typically have on the oil company sides. You'd have someone with, degrees, you'd have like their graduate programs, you'd have young people coming offshore, their first time offshore, but they'd be quite high up relatively.
And then you would have your deck crew, mechanics, electricians, which typically weren't university educated. And the guys right at the very top who'd be like, Oh, I am like the rig manager generally, especially in the old days, wouldn't be university educated, but they would just have worked offshore for a very long time.
So that they'd be very knowledgeable and skilled in what we're doing. A lot of them took degrees as, technology increased. And it became, more important to have a degree, but especially in the old days, although I think at that level in that job, people wouldn't have had degrees, but you do have, it is a big mix between like I said, your deck crew and the people that are more like the, engineers, geologists, et cetera.
And I can't speak for every region, but you do find that you've got, so say the comparative salary or career prospects of a welder, or a mechanic or somewhere you've suddenly got someone who could earn, I don't know, in the U S but in the UK, maybe Twenty five twenty twenty five thousand pounds a year.
Maybe, like three years ago in their offshore making like 60, and it's I think it's the same thing in the U. S. you have people from very poor areas that can go offshore and just, quadruple more there their salaries and it's a, But there's a reason why they're, there's a reason why they're getting paid that is because it's a lot more difficult and dangerous when you're away from home and stuff. It's a strange old mix in a lot of ways.
Leafbox: And then can you describe for people just what the actual dangers are? Give people an image of what these platforms are like to be on them and how to build them and the complexity of these devices.
Andrew: There's so you have there's a lot of different forms, but basically you have a drilling rig. which can be like a semi submersible which floats or a jack up which legs are like sitting on the ground or you could even have a ship that comes like, it all depends on the the depth of the water depth usually.
So you'll have this vessel that drills a well and then eventually, so they'll drill a number of wells and then you'll have a platform which is fixed to the seabed usually and then that can that has like a. A wellhead that connects all the wells and then takes the hydrocarbons on board and then it might pump it to another bigger platform or it pumps it to some like somewhere where it's processed and then it's pumped on shore.
There's different. There's common dangers. Everything from there've been a number of helicopter incidents over the years. Generally, a lot of these rigs are so far away that you'll take a, you'll take a chopper backwards and forwards. And it's been well documented of things like gearbox failures and stuff.
You're probably one of the biggest, I don't have the HSC statistics in front of me, but one of the biggest injuries are probably slips, trips and falls. Because, your average drilling rig has maybe four or five levels to it, and you're up and down stairs all day with big boots on and a hard hat and glasses and stuff, and people tripping on themselves.
Obviously drilling, you've got well you've got a lot of overhead lifts, a lot of people get injured with the fingers getting caught between loads roughnecks, raced abouts on the drill floor when they're handling drilling pipe. I've met a lot of people over the years that have got one or more fingers missing, because it's very easy to get your finger nipped between two things are being lifted, especially when people put their hands on to try and direct them.
And then obviously the pressure of the hydrocarbons look at deep water horizon, for example the oil and the gas, It's funny listening to your podcast with Jed about oil being sentient that the pressure that the oil is under.
So when you tap into, obviously it wants to go, it wants to go up and out. And then that could literally rip a rig apart if it's not if it's not controlled. And then obviously you've got the ignition risk, which, you've got Piper Alpha in the UK and you've got, like I say, Deepwater Horizon, there's been a number of rig explosions and then going back to what I said about platforms.
So Piper Alpha was a platform and that was processing gas. So you have 100 and 170, 200 odd people working and living. on a structure offshore where there are like an enormous amount of gas that's being pumped. extracted and pumped like underneath their feet and it only takes, one ignition source and then you're on top of a fireball.
And I remember being offshore when they're flaring, which is a process whereby they burn off excess gas and just being stunned by the ferocity of the noise, nevermind the heat of the, that it's just like a primal hour, you, you can stand a couple of hundred. Yards away from it and you can feel it on your face, it's just, it's very different.
I've been offshore on a wind turbine installation vessel, which has the same offshore industrial risks in terms of lifted injuries, slips, trips, and falls and suspended loads. But you don't have that. You don't have that like potential that the entire thing can blow up underneath your feet.
Leafbox: So with this danger and this kind of. wild beast underneath you. How did the men and women respond? You had in your email, a little bit of this kind of cowboy culture. I'm curious what the culture of these workers are like, and maybe in Scotland and what you've seen around the world. If these people aren't usually they're more working class or what's the relationship with them and the engineers and yeah, tell me about that.
Andrew: It's it's a very, it's a very masculine environment. That's not to say that there aren't women offshore in the industry. There, there absolutely are. And there, there are more and more these days especially in certain countries, like in Scandinavia, for instance But it's a very, especially when you get down to the deck crew, it's a very, the recruits are very masculine, very like macho environment.
It's quite a tough environment. It's a very hard working environment. The it's not that people I wouldn't say a matter of fact to say the opposite in terms of people having a cavalier attitude to safety. There have been a number of incidents over the years in the industry and each incident spurred along quite a lot of improvements in health and safety.
So I'd say probably in terms of. Industry, it's probably one of the safest industries, well, it's probably one of the industries with the best safety attitude. I'm sure maybe nuclear is probably up there as well, but people are aware offshore of the risks. There's a huge QHSE industry.
There's a, most companies have some form of a HSE system, which allows anyone from someone who works for the camp boss, like someone who changes the sheets, the cleaners, the cooks to like the driller can stop operations if they think that something is dangerous and there can't be any comeback, and stopping operations offshore is a big deal.
Because the average. Rigorate is, it fluctuates, but the average is, I don't know, a few hundred thousand, I don't know what it is at the moment, but let's say up to maybe a half a million more for the biggest rates, biggest rigs per day. That's what, 20, 000 an hour. So if you see something that's dangerous and you stop it for a couple of hours that's a lot of money.
So it takes a lot of nerve to do that, but the industry has been pretty good. They have these systems called stop cards. Like I say, Different companies have different names for it, but it gives the ability to It gives you authority for someone not to be forced into doing something that they think is dangerous.
So overall, I actually think the health and safety culture is quite good. But if you look at Deepwater Horizon, that was a classic example of even at the corporate level, people being frightened to say no and frightened to halt operations. So that does still persist due to the sheer amount of money involved.
Leafbox: And then tell me about in your email, you had a quote line about, these workers spending their money, maybe not as wisely. I'm curious to describe and understand the cowboy. I have this image, my father worked for Exxon for a long time.
And his biggest problem was piracy. They had so much issues with piracy, but this was in the Caribbean. So it's just constantly people stealing oil from them. So maybe yeah, tell me how it is now after I guess 2000s, how it's changed. You're describing this very safe sounding MBA driven culture, but I have trouble.
Yeah. Tell me what it's like around the world.
Andrew: So that's the sort of the day to day attitude offshore, which is pushed very heavily by the oil companies. It's a lot of recording. They record lost time statistics which also not to get sidetracked, but that has a slightly negative effect as well in terms of if a rig has, say.
That they'll, quite often rigs will have a big display when you arrive and it says this amount of days from the last accident and if they go like a year without any LTIs, everyone on the rig could get like an iPad or some sort of bonus or something and it's a big deal not to have incidents that cause a loss of time and that, by that if someone has to go to hospital, someone has to leave the rig, but that also does encourage it can encourage hiding of things, someone maybe, they've smashed their finger, but can they just maybe report it, but maybe just go on like light duties or something rather than go to the hospital before, before their shift change sort of thing which does happen and it's not healthy.
But anyway, to get back to your point I think it comes from, as I say it's, a way for someone who would have no other avenue to earn the amount of money that they would get offshore by taking on the additional risk and being away from home. So say an electrician, your average construction electrician wages are probably pretty good these days, but if you take someone working in, some rural place in, in the States who is like a car mechanic or something, and then they go offshore And they're multiplying their salary, but they're multiplying their salary, perhaps coming from an environment where no one's ever had that type of money.
They're coming home with maybe try to think of some people I've known, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when their salary may have been I don't know, sub six figures, but they don't come from an environment where that sort of money is common. So you then have a situation whereby they are the one person in their family or town or their local bar.
who has loads of money, who's been away from home for four weeks, but he doesn't have the most stable relationship precisely because they're not at home, but yet they've got loads of money and loads of time. You can see how that can encourage perhaps resentment. Or just a feeling of alienation from that community.
That sort of person, say they have a lot more money than their friends, maybe they want to buy them drinks, but then do they want to have to do that all the time? I've known people that have been divorced multiple times, that have bought boats and all sorts of things that they never use and they end up with, paying for There are families that they never see, the families that get remarried, the kids that they never see.
I've worked with directional drillers that I've got a wife in one country, an ex wife in another country, kids that don't like them, and they just pay for all these families. They get onshore and then they spend the next couple of weeks with some, teenage prostitute blowing all the money on that drink for the rest of the month and then they're back offshore.
the shakes and then they decompress over the month and then the cycle repeats itself. So in the one sense, it's a fantastic opportunity for social mobility, but it also can leave a lot of chaos behind it. And I'm certainly not at all. And having come from a work class background myself, I'm not certainly saying that.
It shouldn't be there. I think it's a positive thing and it's up to these people what they want to do with their money. I'm just saying it's an interest in social observance that it's, you don't get that many working class people that can leave school and have a manual trade and can go and be a lawyer or a doctor or a CEO but you are all of a sudden getting these people in situations who are making the same amount of money, but without the family structure.
Or the societal structure that can prepare them for that.
Leafbox: Jumping to the next topic, I'm curious, you first mentioned Dick Cheney, what was your relationship, you're in Scotland, and how does that fiddle in with the Middle East? oil wars and just the general kind of, I feel like when my father worked in oil, there wasn't that much of a hostility in the general environment.
It was just people drove cars and you worked in the oil industry and it wasn't that. So in post 2000, I would say things change both from the climate perspective and then from the kind of American imperialist association with oil.
Andrew: It's changed massively in terms of hostility. Just, it's just like night and day. So when I graduated, I remember being at school in the early nineties and there was, I don't think it was climate, no, no global warming. It was called then. So there was discussion of it.
But the greenhouse the ozone layer was the big deal. And there was environmentalism, Greenpeace was quite big at that time. But. The, there was no stigma like whatsoever into going into the oil industry. And you could see that in terms of the courses at the time they were called there was like drilling engineering courses, offshore engineering courses petroleum engineering.
You go back to the same universities now and it's like energy transition. I think you'll struggle to find that many courses that have got the words petroleum or drilling in it. And also it was very easy to get a job in those days in the industry. The, yeah the Gulf War, so the second Gulf War at the time working for Halliburton, I was very conscious of, it was very interesting to me how the company was structured.
So you had Halliburton Energy Services and you had KBR, Kellogg, Brennan, Root, and they were the company that won the uncontested contract to rebuild in Iraq. But the way the company was structured. Was that they were that they were split up basically. So if one of them had gone down the toilet for any of these issues, they were separated.
I was very happy to join Haliburton. It was a big career wise. I thought it was very good. I look back now, it's funny how I look back, like inside, I look back on that whole Iraq war with absolute horror now, but I had grown up with Free internet with, what at the time were considered authoritative news sources with the BBC and British newspapers.
It might sound naive, but you believe that people are doing the right thing. And I just thought at the time that, that, we were going into Iraq because it was a very bad person there. And I look back now, with I look at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and all the things that have happened with absolute horror.
But at the time it just seemed quite straightforward. My, my view on the oil industry hasn't changed in terms of, I, I believe in an energy mix. I think there's a lot of irresponsibility talked about these days in terms of the energy transition. I do think there should be an energy mix.
I don't think it should be any one source of energy. But I feel like we're in the same position that we're in before except instead of it being everyone's desperate to make money out of oil. I think everyone's desperate to make money out of renewables these days.
Leafbox: Well, before we jump to that point, I want to I think that's a big topic we'll go to, but tell me about your jump to Nigeria.
You're still naive then, or eager help, Nigerian oil industry or what you get assigned to Nigeria. What's that like?
Andrew: Well, so I so that four years of us, so the three years I worked for that company originally was on it was on an ad hoc basis. So basically I would be at home. I'd get a phone call.
And I could, I had to live within 45 minutes of the airport but I usually got at least a day. Sometimes it wasn't, it will, it was literally a day. Sometimes it was like a week, but I would get a call and then I could go anywhere in a region was Europe, Africa, Caspian. So I could go anywhere.
Most of it was in West Africa. So I would go and work offshore in the Congo. Not the DRC, but the Republic of Congo Gabon, Nigeria, but all over Europe and occasionally like the Far East. So I had a lot of experience of Africa at that point. My very first, one thing I did want to, I was thinking the other day, one thing I did want to mention was when I first went, in terms of naivety, when I first time I ever went to Africa was in the Congo.
And I'd grown up in the eighties where we had Live Aid was basically anyone's kind of opinion of Africa. And I remember at school we used to be forced to sing Do They Know It's Christmas, like every Christmas. So that was everyone's opinion of Africa was like just basically starving children. And I arrived in the Congo.
They've got quite a decent airport now in Point Noir, but when I arrived it was literally a concrete shed with arrivals on one side and departures on the other and just like sand on the ground. And I can't remember coming out of that totally by myself just with my Nokia phone with the local contacts phone number and all these little kids appeared like Tugging it, tugging at my trousers asking for money and I was absolutely horrified I'd never seen like poverty like that and I felt horrible that I couldn't help them.
But it's funny how You not that I don't care about children, but you harden yourself to what the reality of life is like in places like that. And I did that for three years. I was in Angola rotating for a year. In Cabinda, which is a chevron camp. And then I I got the job in Nigeria.
And actually my father passed away just before I got that job. So I was a bit rudderless at that point. I really enjoyed it got to me in the end, I was there for three years and I started to get very frustrated when I was at home, that's when I thought I need to make a change.
But there's a sort of happy level of chaos, I found. It's. in Nigeria, where things are, they don't work in the sense that they would do in, in, in what you'd call, developed countries. You can't rely on things to work. You can't really rely on people in a certain sense, but there's a sort of happy, it's difficult to explain.
Like it's just, It's a very chaotic place, a very noisy, chaotic place. But once you accept that it's quite a good laugh actually. I have some quite happy memories from working there.
Leafbox: So Andrew, when you enter in these places you first described your kind of exposure to Congo, but how do you conceptualize the interaction between the Western oil companies and I guess the local developing country?
Do you think about that? Or are all the workers local? Or is everyone imported from all over the world? And
Andrew: There's a big move towards localization in pretty much any location I've been which is, which has changed over the years. So when I first started working say in Africa, as an example.
Pretty much all of the deck crew, all of the roughnecks were all Africans or locals from whichever ever country you're in. But once you got to the upper levels, like the Western oil companies, you would have, so you'd have like drill engineers, which weren't. You might describe them as like project managers of the drilling operations.
So there you would have kind of a mix of locals and expats, but you pretty much always find once you went above that to like drilling managers. You'd find all what they call company men, which are the company's representative offshore, pretty much always expats. That has changed over the years, which I think is a very positive thing.
A lot of countries, Azerbaijan's like this, a lot of countries in Africa, Nigeria is like this. They put within the contracts, like a local content. So for a company to win the license and which is then cascaded down to the subcontractors, you have to have a percentage of local employees and you have to have a system for replacing your senior people, training up locals and replacing them over time, which I think is very positive because after all, it's there.
Oil is their resources. There are in certain locations with certain companies, a pretty bad history. Shell Nigeria, for example. You can your listeners can look all this up, but there have been, various controversies over the years on the whole, I think on the whole, I think.
that it's a positive for these countries because I look at it in terms of a capitalist sort of capitalist approach that, you know and it's almost like the thing that I was saying where you have like someone who comes from a family or a class where they are not exposed to money and all of a sudden they have a huge amount of money where you could say the same thing with some tiny country where by a that they've had a level of civilization and a level of like income over the years and all of a sudden someone discovers oil and there's no way you can reasonably expect a society to just, you can't take somewhere that goes from like tribal pre industrial revolution conditions and make it New York City overnight.
It's just, it's not going to happen. And just expanding that slightly, I was in Papua New Guinea in the eastern part And up in the highlands on a well site a while ago. And that was fascinating because Papua New Guinea is still, it's a country, but it's still very tribal. So once you leave Port Moresby you're really, it's not like you're going to call the police if someone tries to assault you or call an ambulance or something.
It's very much like I say, pre industrial revolution, tribal. societies, but they're sitting on billions of dollars of gas. So you get these little pockets of on the shore drilling rigs. And they're just pumping millions and billions of dollars worth of gas out from under your feet, but they pay the locals.
And the site that I was on right at the top of the hill overlooking it was a big mansion owned by the who, as soon as he started drilling, he would get 10 million. And then, as I was informed, would probably disappear down to Australia and, enrich the local casinos and stuff. But, who is to say that is, would it be great if he built a hospital and built a school and improved the lives of everyone around him?
Oh, of course it would. But who's to say morally that we Chevron should be, I understand the point that maybe Chevron should be building these things, but who is to say that the condition should be attached to what that chief spends his money on. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I I think I place a lot of responsibility on hydrocarbons are located.
I do think there have been a lot of very negative practices by By all companies over the years, and they absolutely have a duty to maintain the environment. But I think it's a bit hypocritical. I see a lot of rich Western countries, especially now saying to a lot of poorer, undeveloped countries that they shouldn't be drilling or they shouldn't be, should be using the money differently.
And I think, well, it's their resource. I look at it more from a capitalist point of view, rather than, like I said in my email, I'm quite anti interventionist in that sense.
So historically I'm going to, this continues now, but there have been issues with literally, so they put these big pipelines through people's villages and the way that a lot of these things are organized is like I said, about Papua New Guinea they'll contact, the tribal chief and we'll pay a rent or some sort of fee to, to put these big pipelines through, through these small places.
But there are some times when, I haven't, I, the right tribal chief or they've not paid enough or there's some sort of dispute and you will get villagers literally drilling into these oil pipelines with drills and buckets to steal the oil. And of course someone's doing it and they're smoking or there's some sort of ignition source and the whole thing erupts and, the village is burnt and it's a horrible, tragedy but it's just it's a funny, again, it goes back to the theory of what I was saying, the juxtaposition of that very valuable resource with a very, with a civilization, with a community, probably better way of putting it, who has never had access to that amount of money.
So you're literally pumping these, this thing through their village that is worth more money than they'll ever see in their lifetime. And obviously the temptation to try to take some of that. is there, almost like understandably, but then again it quite often results in a lot of death and destruction.
So that's yeah, it's just it's part of the whole industry in a lot of ways. And other industries, when you look at things like lithium mining and diamonds and stuff, you have a very high value resource That has been, by pure chance, located in a very poor part of the world and it results in these tragedies sometimes.
Leafbox: I was going to ask you about the processing of oil. So when export the raw crude. Mostly the oils and process somewhere else. You were, you're taking the oil from Nigeria. Like Venezuela, they have to ship it all to Houston or whatnot to get turned into different solvents and gasoline. And,
Andrew: This is probably when I'll need some fact checking, but my recollection of the time in Nigeria was that they weren't processing the oil on shore.
I stand corrected if that's wrong, but my understanding was that they weren't, or at least there wasn't very many refineries, so it was basically all, like you said, extracted and then sent abroad. To be refined. That's certainly the situation in in Papua New Guinea. A lot of it is turned an LPG there and then shipped abroad.
I guess I would guess, I would assume that would be the situation in a lot of West African countries for a lot of reasons, you have an established. Supply chain, you have established skill set in other places, then it comes down to cost and then you have the security of, you can imagine the enormous amount of investment you would need in a refinery.
And would you rather do that in a place that's had a history of civil war, or would you take the cost to ship it abroad and do it somewhere else,
Leafbox: no, it's understandable. I think that's important for listeners to understand that. The refinery in Louisiana or whatnot, or, it's so massive, it's billions of dollars and it's such a dangerous place to work also. Right. Those are just like literally atomic bomb sized potential energy.
Andrew: The one thing that, there's always been, say in Scotland, there's been a little bit of resentment towards, Aberdeen and they're all like rich up there from other places in Scotland, but I think that there is, people are aware of Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha, et cetera, but I do think that there has been an underappreciation of the, just the Crazy risks that are involved when you're working offshore and handling hydrocarbons.
Like I said, you take a helicopter to work with all the risks that I had in, in tails, and then you spend a month or so working on top of something that is effectively, a bomb if if things aren't handled properly. And you're, how far away are you from like emergency services?
There are supply vessels and stuff, but. It's very much an environment where you have to just be very careful and very aware of dangers, which I think the industry now has got very good at. But yeah, the wages are high, but they're high for a reason. It's not it's not an easy, it's not an easy job in terms of that.
And like I alluded to before, in terms of family stability, working away and coming back is not really conducive quite often to, to a healthy home life.
Leafbox: Going back to Angola for a second I read an account of the Chinese are very heavily in Luanda and Angola, and they had the terrible civil war.
But one of the things that really stood out to me is that all the Chinese use Chinese labor. So their oil boats are all Chinese workers and they often use ex felons, which I thought was interesting. But there's, I guess they, all these ex felons in Angola, I don't know if you saw this, I wanted to confirm it, but there's a lot of half Chinese, half Angolan children now because all the Chinese roughnecks.
They're all men. So there's a booming Angolan prostitution and it just was so wild. Angola think Luanda is the most expensive city in the world. But then the most violent too, so yeah, just what's your general impression
Andrew: I I've been in Luanda in total, probably just a couple of days.
Most of my time was spent in a, so Chevron Texco have this place called Cabinda. Which is actually, technically speaking, if you look at the map, it's not actually connected to Angola, you've got Angola, then you've got a little gap, and then you've got Cabinda, which is the little gap is part of the DRC, I think but Cabinda is where all the onshore processing of the oil is.
It's part of Angola and it's like a prisoner of war camp and you go up there and you can't leave pretty much until you've finished your work. But my impression of Lulanda wasn't great at all. I remember driving into it and there's these massive shanty towns on the edge of the city with just like literal rubbish tipped down the side of these hills.
And then you get into the city and it's just a. massive continual traffic jam with Porsche Cayennes and Range Rovers and G Wagons. And it just felt in the way that I was describing Lagos and even Port Harcourt, which has a pretty bad reputation as a sort of, chaotic, but fun sort of chaos.
I felt and this is just my personal impression, I felt Lwanda was chaos, but dangerous chaos. Not you wouldn't stay in a staff house there and you wouldn't go out for a drink anyway. You wouldn't even really go out for lunch much. You just stayed in. It looked to me like as if you'd taken a European city, which I guess it, that's how it was built.
And then you just start maintaining it from like 1960s onwards, but then you'd add it in a civil war and I appreciate the civil war was like a proxy civil war and then just didn't repair any infrastructure and just peppered the whole place with like bullet holes.
It wasn't, it was not particularly, it's not a place that I would recommend to be quite honest with you. In terms of the Middle East, the comparison with the Middle East I've not really worked that much in the Middle East, to be quite honest with you. I guess my closest is the Caspian, which is more Central Asia, but that was way more structured.
Yes, there's massive amounts of corruption, massive amounts of poverty. But yeah, absolutely more structured and less chaotic in that sense.
Leafbox: Andrew, what's the relationship in Nigeria, there's famous activists who, like the Shell, they polluted so heavily, but then I guess the military tribunals would erase or disappear people.
Maybe this is before you worked there, but what, as, what was the relationship of the company men with the government? Was there open kind of corruption or? What was your general vibe of is the manager's job and kind of getting these contracts. Talk to me about that. Like Deanna, how did the, you know, Exxon versus Armco or whatever it is, whoever's ever getting these contracts, there's obviously backdoor dealings.
Andrew: Yeah, in terms of, actual drilling licenses I was never near or even remotely near the people that will be making those sort of decisions. And I'm certainly not going to allege corruption at that level. And I don't have any evidence, but what I would say, and again, all of this is just my personal opinion.
It's, I'm not disparaging any one particular place in general, but the level of corruption. that I would see was so endemic that I just came to feel it was cultural which again, it's not really don't want to make that sound like it's a slight, to me it was an understanding of I really feel, and just briefly going back to the whole Bob Geldof Live Aid thing, I really feel like in the West we've made a mistake over the years in trying to impose our way of looking at the world on other cultures.
And what I would see in most West African countries was it was just an accepted way Of living, accepted way of dealing. So you would go to the airport. We used to have these boxes that would have electronic equipment in them. And we had to hand carry them cause they were quite fragile.
And then you would go to the check in desk and they would be like okay, well we have to get some stairs to lift this into the plane. So that's an extra 50. I'm not sure you actually own this equipment. It's got another company written on it. You give me a hundred dollars.
Sometimes it's not quite said, you'll just get so much hassle and you'd see other, you'd see some people there that would freak out in case thinking that they were gonna, arrested or something. They just open their wallet and hand over loads of money. The, but it's not it's not like some under the table nefarious plot it's just like the checking guy is getting paid next to nothing He sees someone who's obviously got all my money and he has How can I get that money off him and it's at every single level my I mean I suppose I would say I was wise to it, but even I would make naive mistakes.
I remember on a leaving day when I left Nigeria I had this driver who I'd still consider a friend. I messaged him on Facebook sometimes, and he was a really nice young guy who would go out of his, literally out of his way to help me. And I made the silly mistake of handing in my bank card on my like, leaving due.
I'd had a little bit to drink and I just thought, surely it'll be fine. And of course I get back to the UK, I check my statement and there's a couple of hundred dollars missing or a hundred pounds missing. At the time I was like, that must be a bank error, surely not. But I look back in it now and I just think, again, this isn't, this honestly isn't even a criticism, it's just the culture is to try and hustle.
And if you, if it doesn't work, well, I tried. It's just, it's endemic in that sense. I don't doubt that there most likely have been over the years some very shady practices on the behalf of Western oil companies and Western governments. You only have to look at the history of, BP and the UK government and Americans in Iran and coups to get oil and all these sorts of things.
But I'm just talking about like the corruption that I've seen, it seemed, Cultural in that sense. It's just everywhere. The one thing that I would say is that companies I've worked for within the contracts is very heavy anti corruption. So the FCPA, if I'm remembering that right, in the US. The anti corruption laws are very strong to the point where if a company official from a country, say like Scotland, is a manager and he signs off on a bribery expense, he can actually, if I'm right in recalling this, he can end up going to jail himself for that.
So a hundred percent, I'm sure it's happening by at the same time legally, there are some very strict laws against it.
Leafbox: When they just outsource to local sub providers, that's what I would imagine they do to get around that.
Andrew: I think it's a case of well, just don't tell me sort of thing.
Leafbox: Yeah.
Andrew: I'm pretty sure that, that's why. Well,
Leafbox: I think people don't understand if you haven't been to these countries, it's just it's just not Norway. It's not. Yeah. It's a very different. Yeah.
Andrew: And. I, sorry to interrupt you, but I've done quite a bit of work in Norway and I have found that some countries and some cultures seem to have a difficulty accepting that the world isn't the way that they are.
And I think that that, not to, not to boast or to my trumpet here, but I think that one thing that I've learned over the years is that some places they just are the way they are. And it's, of course you don't want to encourage. Corruption, you don't want to encourage mistreatment, but I don't believe it's your right.
Like I'm like, I live in Japan now and some things, a lot of things about Japan I absolutely love, but there are also some things about Japan that just don't seem right to me. But it's not my place to come in and say, right, you're doing this wrong. You should be doing this the other way. It just isn't, it's not my country.
And I felt the same way in Africa. There's loads of things about Nigeria that I was like, this is absolute madness. But it's their madness, it's not my madness, and I'm a guest in their country.
Leafbox: What do you think the difference, in your email to me, you wrote about the colonial being British, how's that relationship been for you?
You've, non interventionist now, but you wrote about, your forefathers or previous generations having quote, good intentions. Maybe tell me about that.
Andrew: I think that I know that there's a lot in the UK as with America now that's quite, there's a lot of attempt to be revisionist within history and question history, which I'm a big fan of people questioning history.
I just think once again, that we are tending to look at things from a very Western point of view without taking into account like global history. I know believe, through my experience of traveling, I now think, well, exactly like what I just said, I don't think it's our place to change countries to mold them in our ways, but I do have a more charitable view of a lot of our maybe not every one of them, certainly not every country's colonial adventures, but I do think that some of them were more motivated by, as I said, a Christian desire to end certain barbaric practices.
If you look at, the I forget what the practice is called, but the practice of people burning their their wives on the husband's funeral pyre in India and the whole slavery, which, yes, Britain was a part of but it's quite clear that, the British Navy was very important, effective in, in, in ending the global slave trade.
So I'm very proud of where I come from and I'm proud of my ancestors. I don't deny that They were put that they, there weren't some, as I said, some negative aspects and atrocities, but I just think that again, when it comes to, and I think about this more because I have kids now.
So I think about how I want them to feel about the country going forward. This is part of, traveling. You see so many countries where people are so proud of their country. Nigerians were some of the most proud people I think I've ever met, and it's the same in Japan. And I worry the direction our country's going, both the UK and the US, when we were raising a generation of children who are being taught to be embarrassed by where they come from.
Leafbox: Going back to oil for a second, Andrew, the colonial legacy is impossible to digest in a short interview, but do you have, what's the general like Pemex or the Venezuelan oil companies or the Russian oil companies? What's your general impression of nationalized oil companies versus the private?
Andrew: Yeah. I so I guess my biggest experience is in Azerbaijan, there's a company called Soka which is the national oil company. And of course all these national oil companies, a lot of them have shares in international like private oil companies.
So it's not always a clear divide of either one or the other, but I guess I, as someone who really. believes in capitalism. I think that in terms of efficiency and certainly in terms of safety, in terms of environmental compliance, I think that the private oil companies are much more answerable to activism, to just a sense of corporate responsibility than private oil companies.
And if you're in somewhere like Russia, like you say, Venezuela and the national oil companies is polluting the water. Well, What are you going to do about compared to a private oil company who has, a much more, it has shareholders and I guess more of a global footprint. But I also come back to the point, as I was saying about localization that these resources are the country's resources and I think it's quite right that companies pay.
I wouldn't say prohibitive amounts of tax, but I think it's quite right that companies pay a lot of money in tax when they extract the hydrocarbons, and they have local content. I guess the ideal for me is private, but with a level of public ownership. But not actually running the operations because I think as soon as you take away, as soon as you take away that meritocracy, you end up with health and safety risks, you end up with just waste, and when it comes to something like with the large amounts of money involved That just ends up taking money away from the actual people.
I don't think it's, I don't think it's generally a great idea, but I think a sort of public, a bit like you see a lot here in Japan actually, a public private mix, if done properly, is probably the way to go for a lot of utilities.
Leafbox: Great. So Andrew, maybe it's time to jump to the oil and energy diverse mix.
Tell me about what brings you to Japan. First, you work on nuclear and now wind.
Andrew: Yeah. For me, I can't claim any sort of high minded high minded drive to change from one industry to the other. It was purely, I had a mortgage and a new baby and I desperately needed a job. So that was how I made that jump.
The one thing I have experienced over the years, it's certainly the place I've worked. It's very, Unless you're in a region that has like a national oil company, it's even then I guess depends who you are. It's very meritocratic, but it's quite cutthroat. So oil companies, service companies, as soon as oil price drops, it's very cyclical.
People just get made redundant. People, I saw people at Halliburton had been there for literally 40, 50 years being made redundant just because the share price dropped a few points. I've been made redundant twice myself. And yeah, it's just horrible. And there's nothing you can do about it because it's an economic decision.
It's nothing to do with your performance. And that happens to, it's probably very few people on the street that hasn't happened to It's the downside of the high salary really. So coming into wind it was really an opportunity to, as I say, we wanted to live abroad again for a little while.
And opportunities to live in Japan don't come by very often. And it's interesting. It's interesting. It's very different. It's interesting from an engineering point of view. It's a lot of heavy lifts. And Japan, I think Japan has a good attitude towards offshore wind, because everything else, Japan has a long term vision.
It has a vision of a percentage mix of nuclear fossil fuels, renewables, whereas I feel like I'm fairly against it in my home country, in the UK, because we don't have a long term plan. We've had four prime ministers in the last two years. One of them wanted to build eight nuclear power stations, the next one to start fracking.
And then the one now wants to quadruple our offshore wind capacity in eight years, which is impossible. It's quite nonsensical. It's quite short term thinking. I'm not anti wind, I'm not pro oil, I'm not anti or pro any, anything. What I'm pro is a science based, long term, non subsidy, non corruption based market solution.
Obviously you've got environmental aspect of climate change, et cetera, which needs to be taken into account. But I found, I find a lot of the attitude towards renewables and towards the energy mix quite histrionic and not really based on facts.
Leafbox: Do you ever think about, geopolitics as an engineer in terms of, where these pressures are coming from.
Europe particularly seems so against oil and hydrocarbons, but if you do any scientific research, you just, there's the capacity of hydrocarbons to produce energy is just unparalleled in terms of the input to output. And wind is just not a realistic option.
Andrew: I think that, I think there's a general I would say it's a mistake, but I think it's done on purpose, but there's a general attitude that seems to be portrayed in the media that you can have one company or one industry is virtuous and everything they do is virtuous and there are no negative connotations or motivations behind what they're doing.
And then the other is just all negative. So right now, it seems like oil is completely negative and then offshore wind is completely positive. You look at the motivations behind companies putting in offshore wind turbines or the service companies exactly the same as motivations behind all companies.
Neither one is doing them. For anything other than to make money. And I think it's simplistic and a little bit silly to think that the boss of an oil company is some sort of J. R. Ewing, person that likes to run over puppies on the way home and the boss of an electricity company or a turbine installation company or whatever.
is some sort of, sandal wearing saint that doesn't care about money. Everyone in pretty much, I would say any corporation, that statistic about men are CEOs, they're psychopaths. All they care about is money. And I think there are a lot of like there's a lot of talk about subsidies.
You just touched on it, I think. And people talk about subsidies and oil when they're talking about subsidies and oil, what they're talking about is the The fact that when you drill an oil well, which can be anything between, I don't know, 30 and like upwards of 100 million, you basically get to claim that back off the tax.
Now the tax in the UK is, it was about 75 percent on the oil that they extract and profit from the oil they extract. But if you have that say 100 million cost, how many companies can drill three or four wells at 100 That you're going to get anything out of that. Very few companies can afford to take that risk.
I don't think it's a bit rich to call that a subsidy when you've got the whole CFD process for offshore wind, which effectively guarantees the strike price of electricity. So you imagine if you had that for oil, you would have, You would have countries buying oil off the oil companies when the price dropped, and they don't have that, they don't have that, that, that mechanism, but you simply wouldn't get offshore winds without a decent strike price, which you've seen recently in the auctions when no one bid on the licenses in the UK, and I think it was the US as well.
Leafbox: So in essence you prefer just like a free market, totally. Not a totally free market, but in the sense that a clear transparent market. So if that really incentivized the right incentives, like you're saying in Japan, they have that mix of nuclear and hydrocarbon and wind and solar. And in Japan, I always feel like they're just burning trash.
That's their real power generation.
Andrew: It's funny that it's such a funny place in so many ways, but you've got this island, which has, a lot of geothermal resources. But in terms of mineral resources, it's not in a great position yet. It manages to be so incredibly self sufficient in terms of industry, in terms of fuel price.
Like they, they said to me when I arrived here, Oh God, it's so expensive electricity. It's like about 60 to, to a month for the electricity in your house. And it's a four bed house with five air cons on 24 seven. I'm like, geez, you just see the price UK. You'd be like, 10 times almost. So they managed to make it work, but like everything else here, like I said, it's a long term, long thought process.
And Obviously, I guess we haven't really talked about it, and I'm not, I don't feel qualified even to talk about it at all, to be honest with you, but in terms of climate change, I am very much meritocratic and capitalist in that sense that I think the market will identify the most efficient.
way of providing energy, but I completely accept that there needs to be a level of environmental regulation because going back to what I said, CEOs, I think of any company would do anything if it made them money. And I've seen, I saw this in Azerbaijan. You go out, you're back, he's an absolutely beautiful city, but if you look back through its history of being part of the Soviet Union, the level of just pollution was unreal and it still suffers from a lot of that, especially out with the main city. So I 100 percent agree with environmental regulations. I think that, I think there's a lot of politics behind climate change. I'm quite skeptical of international NGO organizations, especially with the last few years that we've had.
But I think that the yeah, I think that Japan's got it right. I think we need a mix and we need to not. Pretend like we are doing in the UK at the moment that for instance, the electricity price in the UK is doubled since 2019. And it hasn't here in Japan, and there, there tends to be a thought of, well, we just need to do all this because climate change is going to happen.
It doesn't matter that, that people are suffering now, I don't think, I think people tend to. tend to maybe forget the, it's like the, the just stop oil extinction rebellion types. It's the world we have is impossible to have without oil. Sure. You can reduce it. It's going to run out eventually one day anyway.
So reducing it is not a bad thing, but to pretend that you can just press stop and then you can put in a wind turbine is nonsensical. And the politicians know it's nonsensical as well.
Leafbox: Yeah. Right. That's why I was alluding to the. And of the psychological operations, often there's, conspiracies that Russia, for instance, is funding a lot of those extinction rebellion projects, right?
To get, there's that theory or that the U. S. themselves are pushing climate change propaganda in Europe to strengthen the U. S. Fracking and natural gas markets.
Andrew: Well, I was actually, I was listening to one of your podcasts the other day and I think it was Charles, but apologies if it wasn't, but the comment was about the activities I think of Extinction Rebellion and the people saying that They, the best way for them to do their activities is out in the open.
So the government can't, the government can't arrest them or can't fight them. But I've long thought for a while, it's pretty obvious where, what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. There's that famous quote about, your real enemy is the one that you're not allowed to to criticize in public.
And when you look at The founders of Just Stop Oil, and like you say, Extinction Rebellion, quite often you can find in the UK anyway, there's government grants funneled into these organizations, or even on the local level, like council grants funneled into these organizations. There is no way that you could have an organization that was I don't know, you pick something like an organization that was pro pro racism or pro child abuse or something that could have a demonstration and shut down major streets in the center of London or New York, or an organization that was, pro, I don't know, pro nuclear weapons protesting and sit in the middle of the M6 motorway.
It just wouldn't happen. And we saw that with, again, not getting into the rights and wrongs of it, but we had riots in the UK this year. And the governments were arresting and putting people in jail within a week of the riots. So the government can absolutely stop things when they want to, which makes me think that there is, wherever it's coming from, I have absolutely no idea.
I wouldn't even begin to guess, but I don't believe that these protests are not in some way sanctioned by both of our governments.
Leafbox: Well, that's why I was bringing up the case of your experience in Japan or Baku or even Nigeria. There's just contrast, right? Like you don't see, in Japan, there's a lot of anti nuclear, but you never hear of like the extinction rebellion type people don't seem to exist there.
Or, and can you, in China, obviously it's a totalitarian place.
Andrew: Yeah.
Leafbox: Yeah. It's very complicated. So going back in, you said when you're traveling around and you're working for these different companies, what's your experience as an expat with government agencies like the British embassy and, or the U S embassy, if you're working with a U S firm or other European companies.
EU NGOs or whatnot?
Andrew: So I guess probably, working offshore in the early parts of my career, I hadn't had to look up with anyone from that world. I guess it first came into my arena when I was operations manager in Baku in Azerbaijan. So that was a Norwegian company. So quite often these places, obviously the embassy will, take great delight in companies from that, from whatever country that work in that place.
And I'll try and promote them. Norwegian embassy were really sound, actually very positive. And probably leads on to like Norway's attitude to Norwegian companies, which is very, pro, Norwegian, which I think as it should be contrast that to I'll never forget. A dinner, an oil company dinner whereby there was, I don't know his position, but he was someone who'd just arrived from the British embassy.
And I think it was fairly high up, but anyway, he asked me we were just chatting and I was explaining what I do, and I remember him saying to me, like, how do you cope with the embarrassment of when you go back home to the UK and you tell people what they do and everyone hates you for it. And it took me a moment to register what he was saying.
Now, I was just absolutely stunned. I was like, well, I don't go back. I said something along the lines of I don't go back to the little bubble in North London that you go back to, we come from completely different worlds. And then I just pointed out some of the things on the table and around them that were made out of oil, the makeup on my wife's face, The cups on the table itself is BlackBerry that he was ignoring me by that point on.
And he just shut down. He just he just, he literally just stopped talking to me and looked at his phone. And what struck me was not one uninformed or opinionated person. What struck me was this is like a representative of the British state. This is like my home country. And I found out after that, that the British embassy, around about that time, Nothing to do with my conversation, obviously, but globally, the British foreign office had a policy of they wouldn't promote any companies that were related to the oil and gas industry.
And I know friends that started their own company. I know a friend who was like, late 20s, took a risk, started his own company just spotted a gap in the market offshore, took that risk. A few years ago, he sold that company to an international oil, a bigger oil and gas service company and made a fortune.
He's created jobs like a real pioneer. He's been told at international trade shows that he's not allowed to have his company on the stands of the British embassy. Because it's related to oil and gas, which I find absolutely astounding given the amount of not just from a moral point of view, but given the amount of money that he's contributed to, to essentially paying their wages in the forms of tax, but also and I was kicking myself afterwards for not saying this to the guy I met from British embassy. How many weapons manufacturers does the foreign office promote in places like Saudi Arabia? When I forget which country it was, maybe we were basically building the weapons that the Saudis were dropping on, dropping in Yemen and then various places throughout the world, not to mention British government's involvement in political cues for the establishment of companies like BP in the first place.
The the hypocrisy was just mind blowing and I feel as I've gotten older and I'm quite interested in global politics and I speak from a very UK point of view because it's my country, it's my home. I feel As ever, the British state works against the British people, not for the British people, which is a contrast to some of the countries that we may look down our noses on a little bit more as not developed, where, and Japan is a great example of this, where Japan seems to do things for the benefit of Japanese people, which seems to be a controversial idea back home.
that a politician would do something for the benefit of the actual people in his country. But that to us is to, I think the establishment in Britain now is strange. It's almost like we've, we fall into this, as I would say, a colonial mindset of we are the world's police. Effectively, we need to, we need to spend more time and money changing the world than we need to do looking after things at home.
It's funny, though, because your description of that low level UK consular officer, they seem very disconnected from the actual real world, right? They live in these elite bubbles that are, he doesn't understand what Papua New Guinea's reality is but then is willing to make, intergovernmental suggestions and policy papers and Push ideas, right?
So those impacts.
Sorry. I think that's, you're absolutely spot on. And if you look at it in terms of UK politics and not just politics, but the actual civil service in general, you see this, maybe this goes back to, British society for a long time. Cause we have, class is obviously a big issue in the UK still.
I'm very much. So I'd say it's that. It's that combination of of you start saying like conspiracy theory when you talk about elites, but it is a higher echelon of society who only mix with themselves, you have a combination of, they're out of touch on that one respect, but they have massive amounts of confidence.
So because of the public schools so they're never going to learn. So it just repeats itself, and it just seems to get. get worse over time. I really think that's the direction that we're heading in.
Leafbox: Yeah, it's hard to, yeah the quality of the civil service seems questionable, especially, yeah, if you see like the Japanese civil service, they seem so highly trained and meritocratic and just realistic, right?
Andrew: It's absolutely, it's absolutely amazing to me, and it was mind blowing to me that from the bottom level, from a postman to a. train conductor to someone at the driving license office. They are there even as a foreigner who is making their life 10 times more difficult because you're trying to use google translate and you're not following all the rules.
Their absolute pride and responsibility and everything that they are doing, whether they secretly can't stand you or not, whether they're secretly, they're having a bad day or whatever, they absolutely will go out of their way to do their job as a matter of pride. I don't know how the Japanese do it.
I don't know. It's not something I would say, you can't just replicate Japanese society because they have these cultural reasons. And you wouldn't want to, they, they are Japanese, they are the way they are, but I find it absolutely fascinating. And it makes me, when I go home, I'm actually much less tolerant of things that, that we have in the UK, like trains not running on time.
And all of course, you can't expect your post to be really redelivered or within a reasonable time frame, or of course, The tax office won't answer the phone, and I go back home and I'm like, well, why?
Leafbox: Well, moving back to I guess oil and the climate change stuff, your future, I think you, you want to return to rural Scotland.
What do you imagine there? Or do you imagine returning to the oil sector or to, or is that just killed off in the UK now?
Andrew: It's generally, it's not completely killed off. There are still some rigs offshore. There's still an oil industry. It is artificially diminished by, by quite significant windfall tax and just a lack of government encouragement.
It's not a. It's always been an expensive place, but you have that curve of cost versus stability. And then the stability of the UK has quite often made it more rewarding to invest for the industry than say, I don't know, Iraq or somewhere, but it gets to the point where the, just the cost of doing business doesn't make it worthwhile for anything, but then maybe the smaller producers.
So it is there. It's heavily diminished. It tends to be a hub for Other locations. The, I guess the probably one of the few positives of covert is made remote working a lot easier. Our future at the moment. It's not ideological in the sense that I want to work for any particular industry.
And that's what makes me sound a bit mercenary. But I think that I guess my future might be in some sort of position whereby if a company needs someone who has experience of a different range of industries, which some service companies I think are cleverly exploiting. So you have companies on an actual operator, but they manufacture things for industries.
So they're looking for oil and nuclear renewables, they can service all these industries. I don't know at the moment. We, I, we love Japan. But it's not our home. We want our kids eventually to, I don't want them to feel displaced as they're growing up and we have family back in the UK.
So I see my future eventually as relocating back to the rural part of Scotland where I grew up. So my kids can have that kind of grounding.
Leafbox: And then would you ever consider working for government? replacing the the guy in Baku?
Andrew: I think that I would last about five minutes from what I read about the UK civil service.
It depends what it was. It's never going to happen. It would depend what it was, but from my, and this isn't, this is just speaking from what I read, not from personal experience, but from From the attitude that the establishment and the British government has, I, I just don't think that I would even get hired in the first place, I think that my attitude to life would disqualify me from doing that.
Pretty much any sort of position of influence like that. And I wouldn't get it anyway, to be honest with you as a 46 year old Scottish guy, I just, yeah, it would never happen.
Leafbox: Another question I have just back on oil. You mentioned your, you thought we're going to run out of oil. How. How much credence do you believe in the concept of peak oil?
When that's a very debatable topic and then there's, the conspiracy about hypogenic petroleum and, where petroleum actually comes from.
Andrew: Yeah. Peak oil is obviously shifted over the years and, I've seen that firsthand in terms of, again, with the, capitalism being a driver of Invention within the industry which comes up, really because of the sheer amount of money involved, there's so many inventions and really like technologically amazing inventions in terms of like directional drilling, things that they can do really are mind boggling drilling, like horizontal wells for, multiple kilometers under such high pressure.
I think that sorry, I forgot where I was going with this. I think that That level of innovation has delayed peak oil over the years and how, who knows, there's still a lot of oil there that we don't currently have the technology to access, for instance, especially in the Gulf of Mexico. So I think peak oil could shift.
I find it very difficult to believe like a really specific figure for that. And that has changed over the years. Demand is obviously going to change whether it goes up or down with, population and climate change and renewables. I think that the hypogenic oil theory is absolutely fascinating.
And I haven't even begun to try and understand it, but I think that is. Very interesting. And I'd be really interested to hear someone who's actually looked into whether they think it's accurate or not. It's obviously going to happen at some point, but I think we're pretty far away from it because even as we put in renewables, we put in nuclear, like I went back to my point about when I was talking to that British embassy official, like the sheer scale of, Hydrocarbon involvement in our modern industrial life is so incredibly difficult to untangle.
We may move away from it as a primary fuel source, but moving away from it as a requirement for life, for plastics, for medicines, for fertilizer, I don't currently see how that can be done. So I think there's going to be some sort of requirement for it for at least a significant amount of time.
Leafbox: Great. Andrew, is there anything else you want to share? Or I think this is an interesting. Overview of your career, but anything else you'd like to give this interest?
Andrew: Just, Oh, for one thing, I really appreciate the chance to talk about these things. I'm not in academia. So a lot of these things like bounce around my mind for years and bore my mind.
So I really appreciate the ability to talk about, I guess the biggest thing when I've been thinking about, what to discuss today was really I'm not an expert on climate change. I'm not an expert on, I'm not even really an expert on renewables or oil. I can just share my experiences. The thing that I find most frustrating is, and as I said to you, we seem to have lost the ability to have, this is why I like podcasts, we've lost the ability to have new and long form discussions where we can talk about Climate change, we can talk about oil versus renewables.
Can you recall the last time you heard an expert from the industry, an expert from renewables talk about the pricing mechanisms and subsidies? You never get that. Certainly not in the media that I see, in the UK, you get short soundbites, headlines. And we've lost that sort of what I grew up with the late night TV talk shows where people would sit around, smoking in a dark room and, but they would talk about these things for hours because they would assume the audience at a level of intelligence.
I think podcasting and the rise of the new media is really bringing that back, which is why I really like it. It's still not mainstream and it still doesn't, it doesn't really shape policy that much because it doesn't access the mainstream media. I wouldn't want anyone to listen to think that I'm being dogmatic on these issues because I feel uninformed myself.
But I would hope that in the future, this type of media might help. produce actual debates where we can actually learn something from experts and not politicians or media figures who are driven by corruption, essentially. Partisan views.
Leafbox: No, I think that's why I sent you that discussion I had with Jed.
He's a Marxist and you're definitely a capitalist, but I think you'd be very open to listening and you'd probably come to agreements on some of the environmental policies that need to be in place, but maybe differ on the ownership structures and incentives. Yeah. But I think that's still productive.
Right. So I think, I'm going back to the guy in Baku, the consular officer, maybe it was his youth or his inexperience, but. I think the long, yeah, understanding how complex things really are is very fruitful and useful.
Andrew: He was he was actually, this is why I thought, I wasn't sure whether he was senior or junior, but he was actually older than me at the time.
I was like late 30s and I wouldn't have put him. younger than like 45. He was definitely experienced, but I think that's that level of that. And again, I want to shy away from the word elite because there's a lot of terms as soon as you use them, people think, Oh, you're some conspiracy theory, crazy.
But I think it's that level of, I think it's almost the opposite. He has that much experience. He's been in that system for so long that. He has an inability to take a different viewpoint, as soon as you start saying something like that, he's well, you're just you're just you're not worth listening to because you're wrong, effectively, I think.
And I wouldn't want to be like that on the other side, that's why I quite like that, your podcast with Jed. This is going on so much, especially when it comes to the history of Marxism and communism and the destruction that's caused, but I absolutely would defend and be happy that he has that platform to to debate.
To broadcast that, and who knows, he might, and there were some things in there that I thought, actually that's a fair point, but this is, I just feel like this is so important. And this is what is missing from so much of this debate about climate change and oil and renewables. And it's so important as well.
There's literally nothing more important than our energy because it ties into the availability of education and medicine and travel and communication. Right, without. some form of mass energy production. We're right back to the medieval ages when your average life expectancy is what, like 30? We're back to, we're back to so far where we are now.
It's just, unimaginable. And it's again, just, to finalize that ties back to my kind of awakening and impression of Japan, that they have this sensible mix and the sheer irresponsibility of governments, especially my own one at the moment, who, we just shut down our last oil refinery.
We don't, we just don't have a plan to, to replace all these things. And it's just incredibly irresponsible and dangerous. I think,
Leafbox: Andrew I think we'll leave it at that. On a positive note, no, the UK, Europe, I think they're like self, it seems suicidal, their policies.
I have trouble understanding it. My, my dad was British actually, and it's hard to, he's from a British colony. But yeah, it's just very difficult to understand the geopolitics of it all. Especially when you compare it to Japan. So I think the biggest thing I want people to take away is the interdisciplinary aspect of your career is also interesting for people to take.
Jumping from the oil to kind of a renewable sector, and then it gives you a different perspective that I think is useful for people.
Andrew: Yeah, I appreciate that. I hope yeah, I hope some, someone, somewhere find something interesting about it for sure.
Leafbox: Great, Andrew. I appreciate all your wisdom and your humility as well. So I'm sure you have a busy day. Thank you so much.