Government responds to consultation on the North Sea transition
IOM3 submitted a response to the Government's North Sea consultation last year.
The consultation 'Building the North Sea’s Energy Future' ran from March to April 2025 and outlined the government’s intentions to transition the North Sea to a world-leading offshore clean energy hub. The consultation invited inputs on areas such as the role of local workers in new energy supply chains, investment needed to achieve the transition and the parts of the supply chain that will be most impacted.
IOM3 submitted a response to the consultation with input from our membership across the energy industry, emphasising the need for a full lifecycle approach to the management of materials used in clean energy technologies.
The government has released the ‘North Sea Future Plan’, responding to the consultation findings and outlining their strategy for the energy sector in the region. The government reiterated the objective to ensure oil and gas workers and supply chains can take advantage of the clean energy transition and the intention to support local communities through a managed and orderly transition period.
The Plan identifies three key energy sectors that will be focused on in the North Sea; offshore wind, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen. The government will strive to enable the development of infrastructure, supply chains and capital in each of these sectors.
To oversee the implementation of the Plan, the North Sea Future Board will be established. This board of experts, supported by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, will review progress, identify barriers to success, promote opportunities to stakeholders and drive investment. This is a welcome initiative and well aligned with IOM3 calls for a coordinated and strategic approach to the transition in the basin.
With regards to skills, the Plan highlights that the shrinking oil and gas workforce can be an important source of labour for clean energy industries in the coming years. It is anticipated that achieving the government’s clean energy superpower mission could require up to 860,000 workers by 2030 and it is expected that many of the skills required will overlap with those of the fossil fuel industry. Access to relevant retraining opportunities and awareness of career pathways are highlighted as important initiatives to support workforce transition between declining and growing industries.
These efforts for an orderly and fair movement of workers are crucial to the success of the government’s ambitions for the North Sea and are in line with IOM3 recommendations. However, in the implementation of the Plan a greater emphasis on skills covering the entire clean energy supply chain is needed. As highlighted in the IOM3 submission, skills shortages facing the clean energy sector go far beyond the installation and maintenance of infrastructure. The delivery of the North Sea transition relies on skilled workers across the breadth of the materials supply chain, from the sourcing of critical minerals for wind turbine nacelles to advanced corrosion resistant materials for CCUS.
The government’s approach to the North Sea could also benefit from a more explicit focus on materials circularity. While acknowledging calls from consultation respondents to consider the full lifecycle of clean energy technologies, the responsible management of material resources is not comprehensively integrated into the Plan itself. Oil and gas decommissioning is recognised as a cornerstone industry and there is a welcome intention to assess the potential for repurposing infrastructure on a case-by-case basis. However, little attention is given to the end-of-life management of windfarms or the establishment of circular supply chains for clean energy infrastructure more broadly.
