Mining Japan's experience to guess at what lies ahead for Aberdeen

Start planning now. That's the most important advice I can give.' So a senior official from Yubari City in Japan told me.

North Sea oil and gas workers to strike for the first time in a generation.

Many desks in his office sat empty, yellowed computers and piles of faded documents stacked where people used to work. The fluorescent tubes had been pulled out of half the overhead lights to save electricity.

What had I asked to provoke such a response? If I start the story, you’ll soon twig. Yubari is an administrative district in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Up until 1990, it was the de facto coal mining capital of the country.

People came from all over to work, attracted by high wages and stable jobs. Then the coal mines closed. 
Desperate to fill the economic void, city officials instigated a film 
festival (successful), skiing and tourism (moderately successful) and a theme park (utterly disastrous).

These interventions were not able to stop the rot, and in 2007 Yubari became the first Japanese municipality to file for bankruptcy.

Its population is now one tenth of what it was at the coal mining peak, and the legacy of flashy town halls, schools and hospitals left behind by the coal industry – for which the city authority has had to assume liability – continues to drain town resources.

Substitute coal for oil, and Hokkaido for Scotland, and the reason for my interest in Yubari becomes clear.

I wanted to find out what one town which has already experienced the end of fossil fuel industries could teach my current home – Aberdeen.

For the past five years I’ve been researching what the future of North Sea energy might look like as our oil and gas fields mature.

My goal hasn’t been to establish how many billion barrels of oil are left or how many millions of pounds of revenue we might drag out, but rather how the pathway the North Sea follows from now on in affects daily living for the citizens of Aberdeen and its surroundings.

And what I learned from Yubari is that if north-east Scotland wants to avoid storing up trouble, it needs to act now.

At the risk of being labelled reactionary, my mind has been focused by the recent oil price downturn. There have been previous lows from which the industry has recovered, and I know prices are better than they were six months ago. But this short-term view misses the point. It might not be this year, or even this decade, but at some point North Sea oil and gas operations will cease to be viable. And when that time comes, north-east Scotland will need something to replace it. The current downturn is as good a point of departure as any for a discussion on what this future might look like.

I am not advocating shutting down all the rigs overnight, nor do I seek to trivialise the jobs that have been lost. Our society will need oil and gas for a while yet. Until renewable technologies can meet our energy needs it would be sensible to make the most efficient use of fields already in operation – like those in the North Sea – rather than looking elsewhere.

Let’s not forget the UK has strict climate change targets too, which the North Sea and all the offshore engineering knowledge Aberdeen has accumulated over the last 50 years can help to meet.

Offshore wind, wave energy, and carbon dioxide capture and storage could all play a part in a managed transition for the North Sea, squaring our climate obligations with building a more sustainable economic base for the north-east and beyond.

But to achieve this we need coherent and stable policy across all levels, and forward planning to ensure Aberdeen is able to grasp the opportunities that come its way,

I will resist the obvious comparison between Aberdeen and Detroit. The cultures, industries and politics are different. Even Yubari is a bit of a stretch.

But with so many examples globally of what can happen when an industry on which a city depends has run its course, I find it concerning and frustrating that all the talk is about prolonging North Sea production seemingly into infinity.

This is understandable with so many jobs on the line, but surely there has to be room to talk about what happens when Scotland has taken oil and gas as far as it can?

As we academics say, it’s a conversation that needs to be had.

Dr Leslie Mabon is a Lecturer in Sociology at Robert Gordon University’s School of Applied Social Studies in Aberdeen.