FORTIES
oil . Decommissioning was meant to start in 2013 , but the life of the field was later extended by another two decades . CLAIR
SIX OF THE UK ’ S BIGGEST OFFSHORE OIL FINDS
450,000 strong . Last year , that figure dropped to 370,000 , with 40,000 further job losses forecast by the end of 2016 .
With the government trying to incentivise new oil discoveries and developments , we take a look back at some of the most significant offshore oil and gas fields in the country ’ s history .
FORTIES
The Forties oil field is thought to be one of the largest oil fields in the North Sea based on both cumulative production and remaining reserves . Discovered in 1970 , it was BP ’ s first major oil find , producing some 500,000 barrels of oil during peak production in 1979 . The field set a record when it produced its billionth barrel in 1982 , and went on to produce two billion barrels by May of 1989 . In 2003 , Houston ’ s Apache Corporation purchased the field for more than US $ 800 million and vowed to extract another 800 million barrels of recoverable reserves in the field ’ s lifetime .
As of 2010 , Forties has produced more than 2.6 billion barrels of
oil . Decommissioning was meant to start in 2013 , but the life of the field was later extended by another two decades . CLAIR
Discovered in 1975 , the Clair oilfield lies in Scottish territorial waters around 75 kilometres west of Shetland . It is thought that the field is currently the largest hydrocarbon resource being developed on the UK continental shelf .
The Clair reservoir was discovered in 1977 , with appraisal wells drilled in the 1980s . However , challenging reservoir characteristics meant that drilling could not commence for several decades . In 2001 , the field ’ s developers
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