Scotland's third oil industry

If you cycle along the minor roads through the agricultural landscape north of Newburgh you will come across the incongruous sight of an oil installation in the middle of a field, south of Cruden Bay and near to Whinnyfold. This is a pumping station at the landfall of a major pipeline bringing ashore Scotland's oil. The complex Forties pipeline system carries about 700 thousand barrels per day, 30% of the UK's oil. It is owned and operated by UK-based global energy company BP. The system, which consists of a 36-inch pipeline originating at the Forties Charlie platform, carries crude oil 169 kilometres to the Cruden Bay pumping station. From there, the crude flows a further 209 km south to the processing facility at Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth. You can see maps of this vast pipeline system here.

North Sea oil is in fact Scotland's third oil industry. The first was based not on petroleum oil but on whale oil. In the 18th and 19th centuries whalers sailed to Greenland from Scottish ports, particularly Dundee, Aberdeen and Peterhead. There they harpooned Bowhead whales and brought back their blubber in barrels. The blubber was boiled back in Scotland and the oil used for a range of purposes including street lighting and textile and jute manufacture. You can read all about the Scottish whaling fishery here.

The second oil industry came about thanks to one James 'Paraffin' Young. In 1851 he began to distil oil, at first from coal and later from rock shales, near to Bathgate, in West Lothian. This was the foundation of the modern oil industry, providing the raw material for a new range of chemicals. His legacy can still be seen in the landscape of West Lothian in the form of huge red mounds or bings, of spent shale from which oil has been extracted.

This concludes my 100th blip!