Interview: Paul Carter, writer

The Aberdeen-born, Australia-based oil worker has seen life on drilling platforms in 16 countries, across three continents; ironically, never making it back to the North Sea of his birthplace. And if you thought the industry was a simple case of two weeks on, two weeks off, with a nice tax-free salary at the end of it, you’ve obviously lived a sheltered life. “Think of all the worst parts of the Bible,” says Carter, “and add lots of beer.”

There was me thinking you weren’t allowed alcohol on the rigs, I say. “You're not allowed to sniff coke on the rigs either but we did that too.” Naive, much?

Now his books about the experience are set to be turned into a film directed by Australian Clayton Jacobson, with a screenplay by John Collee, who studied medicine at Edinburgh University and went on to write Master And Commander, Happy Feet and Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic starring Paul Bettany.

A self-confessed air force brat who left school with no qualifications, Carter moved around from place to place with his military father and German mother, living in Scotland until he was 15. Then his parents divorced and he moved to Perth, Australia, with his mother. “You know how your parents, when you're growing up, tell you one thing and you do the opposite?” he says. “Well, both my parents said, ‘For goodness sake, do your homework and study and whatever you do don't go out roughnecking.’ So at 16 I dropped out of school and started roughnecking.”

He worked in the oil field for 20 years, and says his experience was worlds away from the well-regulated industry in Europe. “Most of my time was spent working in third-world toilets,” he laughs. “There could have been a coup, a jihad, an uprising, an insurrection, a flat-out war – it didn't matter, the drilling went on regardless. So quite often the distractions that went on were just ignored by the rig managers – everything up to and including non-legal addictive stimulants, prostitutes, firearms ...

“People think it's the same throughout the world, but somebody who has been rotating in the North Sea or out of Great Yarmouth will have no clue about what a crew change is like in Colombia, for example. You get to Bogota, you get yourself half a gram for 20 bucks, then you're in a bar full of 19-year-old topless girls and you're a 40-year-old middle-aged guy. You tell me what's going to happen.

“That's what I was always scared of with my future,” he says. “But I promised my wife if we ever got married and had kids I'd quit, because 90 per cent of the guys I've ever worked with are into their second and third marriages. It doesn't lend itself to happy families.”

And so, after he and Clare married in 2006, Carter gave up life on the rigs. “It was like, ‘Which leg am I going to saw off?’ I'd worked with the same crew the whole time and I was closer to those guys than I am to my whole family. They're like brothers. I knew I was quitting for the right reasons but I was terrified. Clare was pregnant with our daughter. I didn't finish high school, I had no formal education or skill sets or qualifications of any kind. At the time I was 38 and I thought, ‘F***, what am I going to do? How am I going to support my family?’”

Luckily, a phone call came out of the blue and he was offered a desk job with an oil company. Then there were his three books, of course. But he could never quite bring himself to leave oil altogether. “I just can't do it. I love the industry so I bought into an oil field service company, which is run by a bunch of Scotsmen, of all people, in Perth, called Scotia.”

Ironically, he is also a green fuel convert. He circumnavigated Australia on a bike running entirely on used cooking fat, and next year plans to break the world land speed record, also running on lard. “I'm doing my level best to find a sustainable alternative fuel source – sustainable at the pump – aside from conventional hydrocarbons,” he says.

Not, though, because he thinks we might run out of oil some time soon. “Peak oil is a myth – there is no peak oil, that's just bullshit. There is more than enough hydrocarbons within our planet for us to keep going the way we're going for centuries. The future of obtaining that fuel is deep-water exploration. What concerns me is that if we keep doing that, we will damage the biodiversity on this planet.

“We're doing it now. I would imagine within the next century there's every potential for some kind of awful mass extinction. Let's say there's 100 million life forms on earth – we'll wipe out half of them. We'll have dogs and cats and lions and tigers but all the rest of the biodiversity will just become extinct because we keep burning fossil fuel.”

Despite being a father, of Lola and Sid, his sense of adventure shows no sign of waning. As well as the land speed record – which, by the way, is a nippy 267km per hour – he’s also hoping to fly an aircraft across Australia, fuelled by biodiesel. What does Clare say to all this? “She knew what she was getting into when she married me,” he says. “It's the reason I married her – she's totally unflappable. I'll freak out and panic and cry and Clare is the strong one. She just goes, ‘Yeah, OK, get your life insurance sorted out.’”

RUTH WALKER