'It was colourful': North Sea net zero chief on working offshore as a woman in the '90s

Myrtle Dawes was one of the first black female offshore engineers in the North Sea

Women make up a tiny fraction of North Sea workers. But when Myrtle Dawes started out as an offshore engineer in 1991, the wind-lashed oil platforms off the coast of Scotland were even more of a man's world.

"It was some of the first women to be offshore," the 56-year-old remembers. "It was an unusual thing. It was unusual for me, of course, to be on a platform full of men. But it was also unusual for the men, because this is not what they were used to.”

Many of her male colleagues had been in the army or Merchant Navy. She was fresh out of Imperial College London and worked for BP on the Forties Bravo structure in the huge Forties Oil Field, 110 miles east of Aberdeen.

Myrtle Dawes | Centrica

"I have to say, look, I was treated very well," Ms Dawes, who is an advisory board member for the Association of Black and Minority Engineers, said. "I was quite young, so people see you more as their daughter than anything else."

She added: "But all the things you would expect in terms of behaviours existed. It was very colourful in terms of what was up on the wall - I need say no more. It was colourful as to what was coming through the TVs.

“So all kinds of stuff was going on at the time. To some extent I was too young to know any different, but it's not an environment that you would have now, for men or for women, put it that way.

"But you know, it got me started, so I'm very pleased to have had the opportunity. And my words to others when they say ‘look, has anything changed?’ I will say it absolutely has changed."

She recalled it being “a bit scary” as well. "I didn't swim at the time and I was afraid of heights,” she said. “Flying off to the Forties field on a platform every two weeks did get my heart going."

Ms Dawes is now chief executive of the Net Zero Technology Centre, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the energy transition. Established in 2017 through the Aberdeen City Region Deal, it is the leading technology hub for the North Sea energy sector, and has unlocked £430 million in funding for more than 200 projects. Her experiences offshore, and the wider engineering achievements in the sector, have fuelled her optimism.

Workers in the North Sea developed their skills while dealing with “some of the harshest environments in the world”, she said. "These are the skills that exist in our supply chain. They don't exist, necessarily, in other people's supply chains."

However, the pace towards net zero “needs to step up”, Ms Dawes said, and a streamlined planning process would help. “If we want to do something quicker, we need to balance some of the planning issues against the imperative around net zero,” she said.

She said Scotland can be an “economic powerhouse” in wind energy. “We’ve got some of the best wind resource in Europe,” she explained. “The nice thing about wind resource is it needs to be delivered locally, and we’ve got both our islands and then we’ve got mainland Europe, so we’ve got a ready customer.”

But there needs to be proper planning to make a just transition happen, she said.

Myrtle Dawes | Contributed

BP recently announced it would slash funding for clean energy and ramp up fossil fuel extraction, in a bid to boost returns for its shareholders. Asked about this, Ms Dawes said the journey to net zero “isn't a straight road”.

Parts of the transition may take longer than initially anticipated, she said, but “others are moving very quickly”.

This is all very new, she stressed. “It’s the first time we’re doing it,” she added. “Show me the person who is the expert on that. I can show you the expert on people who have built oil and gas facilities; I certainly can’t tell you the expert on the people who have built out gigawatts and gigawatts of offshore wind in our basin.”

Ms Dawes said she is in favour of the UK using its own gas rather than importing it. “While we’re using gas, I don’t know why we wouldn’t use our own gas,” she said.

However, she rejected suggestions that climate activists opposed to new fossil fuel projects were misguided.

“The role of the activist is to do the protest and be provocative, to force us to think about what we’re doing, and certainly their actions have forced me to think about ‘look, what are we doing?’” she said.

“And to some extent that’s why I’m working in the Net Zero Technology Centre, because I really want to make a difference. But I also know that we need to make sure that we do this transition properly.”

Asked if Scotland’s 2045 net zero target was still realistic, Ms Dawes called it a “difficult question”, later adding: “Based on where we are today, we would need more things in the plan to get that to work.”

However, she said breakthroughs could happen to push things forward, and drew a comparison with the rise of artificial intelligence.

“Put it this way - if we didn’t hit the target, but we hit it in 2047, I’d equally be proud, as opposed to we’re not going to make it at all,” she said.

Ultimately, Ms Dawes argued, if we can invest in space exploration and going to Mars, "I think we can put some floating wind farms into the North Sea".