© apachecorp.com
Announced today in oilandgaspeople.com in manner which caused me temporary confusion about the location:
‘Apache Corporation has announced a significant oil discovery on Block 9/18a Area-W in the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea. Garten is located 6 km south of the Beryl Alpha Platform.’
Not being an expert on oil-field locations, the lack of reference to, say, ‘east of Aberdeen’ or east of Shetland’ and the name ‘Beryl’ made me wonder if this was in the English sector (It’s not, see map above) after the Blair/brown redrawing of our maritime borders to give them a wee share of the oil. See these, for a reminder:
http://www.oilofscotland.org/scotlands_stolen_sea.html
The article goes on to say:
‘The Garten discovery well targeted a downthrown structural closure and encountered more than 700 ft of net oil pay in stacked, high quality Jurassic-aged sandstone reservoirs. Recoverable resource is expected to exceed 10 MMbbl of light oil, which is at the high end of predrill estimates. Apache has a 100% working interest in the Garten block.’
This find follows:
Multi-million-barrel oil discovery in North Sea
in March and, together with it, suggests news discoveries are being made contrary to the media doubts about the future of the North Sea.
Talking-up Scotland 
Those pictures which purport to show “English” waters off St Andrews or Carnoustie really piss me off. It’s bad enough that the maritime boundary for fisheries (it doesn’t apply to oil and gas) was gerrymandered without compounding the problem with lies. Easily disproven lie at that. Take a look at the map just above the picture you’ve posted; how far is it from St Anderews to the boundary? It’s at least 50 miles, and no-one can see 50 miles out to sea. The curvature of the Earth makes it impossible to see anything like that distance. Every drop of seawater you can see in that picture is on Scotland’s side of the boundary.
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Whether you can see it or not is immaterial as far as I am concerned – England STOLE 1000s of miles of Scottish water as they steal everything else from everyone else and have done throughout their history
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I’m with you, Holebender. Plus – The line of sand with a line of trees behind it in the middle distance in this photo is Tentsmuir which is directly north of St Andrews. So in fact the photo is pointing towards Dundee!! I suppose it’s more interesting than pointing a camera directly east to the open sea. Though as you say, that still wouldn’t be a photo of “England’s sea”.
There’s a growing tendency in Indy circles to produce posters like this which pick up on an emotionally telling topic – England’s sea or England stealing Scottish oil or England retaining Scottish tax revenues – but are very inaccurate in portraying the topic. I call them false Indy memes. I sympathise with the intentions and emotions behind these memes but not the way they’re being portrayed. And of course they whizz round social media very rapidly. I’ve been thinking about why they’re becoming more prevalent. My thoughts so far are here http://paleblueplanet.net/?p=3106
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John? Sorry this is way O/T but can you recall the article you published outlining how all our Scottish institutions are run by English people? I recall commenting under it asking if you would work out the number of Scots running English institutions? A while back, why I can’t recall.
You’re doing a grand job keeping us updated on the upside of living and working in Scotland. Hope you’re well 🙂
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Thanks
Here it is:
http://newsnet.scot/archive/arts-institutions-universities-colonised-case-cringe/
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Thank you so much John. I think that was a great piece of research and one we should keep spreading amongst ourselves and more widely. I wanted it as someone had asked on Wings earlier today whether our creative institutions were being run by ‘unionists’, I was instantly reminded of your research on this and wanted the person to see the reality, not so much ‘run by unionists’ as run by our English neighbours (could be argued one and the same). No other country on Earth contends with this degree of cultural and educational influence from their neighbours…and neither should we.
Thanks again for digging it out for me John. 🙂
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Pleasure. My first search for ‘institutions’ got it.
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