It was 50 years ago today that the North Sea began to give up its riches to the British economy, a little over 18 months after the drilling rig Sea Gem found the first oil and gas in British waters.

It was on March 6, 1967, that the first North Sea natural gas was brought ashore at Easington in Terminal in Yorkshire and the oil and gas fields on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) were open for business.

This year also saw the beginning of an extraordinary ten-year programme which saw the conversion of every gas appliance in the country to use natural gas rather than town gas.

Oil finds followed and the North Sea oil and gas industry was born, centred on boom town Aberdeen. It is estimated that more than 1.4m people have since worked in that industry which simply did not exist before the mid-1960s.

THE HEAVY PRICE THAT WAS PAID?

It was paid in human lives. That original rig, the Sea Gem, collapsed and sank even before North Sea gas came ashore. Two days after Christmas in 1965, the rig – a converted sea barge – was moving to a new drilling location off the coast of Lincolnshire when two of its support legs collapsed due to structural fatigue, the rig capsizing and sinking in seconds. Of the 32 men on board, 13 were killed and five seriously injured.

Though there were helicopter accidents – 45 men died in the 1986 BIH Chinook crash – Sea Gem was the worst rig disaster in the British part of the North Sea until Piper Alpha exploded in July, 1988, killing 167 men.

SO WHAT ABOUT ALL THAT OIL MONEY?

After BP’s Sea Quest found the first oil reserves in the Arbroath Field and then discovered the massive Forties field, which is still producing oil today, the UK treasury began to benefit to the tune of billions of pounds each year.

It is estimated that over the 30 years from 1980 to 2009, based on calculations made in 2011 using the then oil price, the UK Government received the equivalent of more than £300 billion from taxing the North Sea.

It paid for everything from the massive increase in unemployment benefits under Margaret Thatcher’s de-industrialisation policies to tax cuts for the wealthy.

WHY NOT PUT SOME AWAY IN AN OIL FUND LIKE NORWAY?

In 2009, the Scottish Government commissioned a report on an oil fund for the whole of Britain – generous of us Scots, of course, to give away our riches.

The report stated: “Had the UK Government invested just 10 per cent of the nominal revenues received from the North Sea from 1980 onwards into an oil fund, it could now be worth between £24 and £47 billion depending on the returns generated by the investments.”

No one challenged the figure that was calculated using actual prices over three decades, and as every unionist knows, the price of oil has fallen since then. Yet as of today, Brent Crude is more than twice the price it was in the mid 1990s, and there is still no oil fund and control of North Sea oil and gas revenues is reserved to Westminster.

BUT THE NORTH SEA BOUNTY IS RUNNING OUT, ISN’T IT?

Yes, but not entirely, and that’s why big oil companies such as BP are investing heavily in exploration in the UKCS off Shetland. Technically speaking west of Shetland isn’t in the North Sea but it tends to be lumped in for shorthand purposes.

The Clair field alone could keep supplying 100,000 barrels a day until 2050 at least. And oil experts say that oil reserves off the West Coast could be worth £1 TRILLION and last for a century.

Oh, and the Culzean gas field in the North Sea is expected to start producing gas from 2019 and supply up to 5 per cent of the UK’s needs when it reaches maximum production. It will supply gas into the 2030s.

So 50 years of production already achieved, and many more to come.