What a difference four years make! In 2009, in the middle of the world recession, this show was as dead as a door nail. It was moribund and, as one observer this year said to SEN, it seemed like a ‘belts-and-boots’ show. It was dull.

Scroll forward to last week and 60,000 people came through the doors with an incredible vitality and buzz. There was a good deal of technology on view - only just some of it subsea - and there seemed many not-very-well-known companies with rather biggish stands, all looking to get a piece of the rising offshore market. Long may it continue for all.

And it seems to be with £13.5bn in capex already committed this year, according to Malcolm Webb of Oil & Gas UK. This spending is led by Statoil’s Mariner (SEN, 30/9) heavy oil project at £4.3bn and GdF’s Cygnus (29/20) gas development at £1.4bn.

Probably of equal significance are two major brownfield projects - EnQuest’s £170mn spend at Thistle and CNR’s commitment of £300mn at Ninian - which indicate there is continuing life in the older fields as well.

The show was treated (?) to a speech by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne whose qualification for his job is based on being heir to a paint company fortune. So he is quite skilled at painting over mistakes and papering over cracks.

The Tory Party-led coalition government here has discovered that the offshore oil and gas industry is quite important to the national economy, after having thoroughly ticked off almost every single part of the industry by increasing the supplementary corporation tax without any consultation.

Even the government’s supporters in the industry thought that was a totally crap idea. There was a recent backtrack that offered a range of ‘cashback’ deals on heavy oil, frontier, brownfield and special ‘Cygnus’ sized gas fields.

So now he has been ‘briefed’ on the industry and there is even a snappy new phrase - ‘volumes and value’ - which he tagged onto the offshore sector. Lovely.

One subject that Osborne seems to know about - or fakes it pretty well - and favours is shale gas. The so-called DASH FOR GAS got strong backing from a non-political source - Prof John Miles from Cambridge.

As one would expect from an academic of his standing, Prof Miles, speaking at a breakfast, gave a thorough run-through on the energy mix here, the role each source - oil, gas, nuclear, coal and renewables - plays in the electricity generation market and the status of the generation capacity.

A major problem, surprisingly, has been the low cost of coal. As of a result of a recent spate of buying coal and burning it for electricity, the remaining life of a number of power stations has been used up quicker than was expected.

The result is that the UK needs to build new generating capacity and needs to do it now. So what’s the answer? Obviously not nuclear as that is the longest planning process.

The short answer is that based on cost, time to build and even the effect on the environment, gas-fired power stations are the only answer to preventing the lights from going out here. Osborne will be pleased.

DECOMMISSIONING is another big issue in the North Sea where there is a portfolio of facilities facing shutdown in the near-term. Everyone knows that Shell is starting work in the Brent complex (30/10) at the Delta platform, but what about the others? Charlie is still trundling along and may keep operating until at least 2023. Even with this extension, there remains the issue of what to do about PENGUINS (SEN, 29/14) where production has been on again, off again due to problems at Brent.

Shell was apparently thinking about a tieback to the Murchison platform, but CNR has just begun its own abandonment plan there, so how that would work is a mystery.

Across the median line, Statoil is due to take some initial decision about Statfjord A in 2017, but like Shell is looking at a scheme to extend its production life.

BP has been the busiest operator in terms of contracts awarded for NORTH SEA projects over the last three years, according to a report from the Energy Industries Council.

With Clair Ridge (30/2) and the Quad 204 (30/10) redevelopment, amongst others, underway, BP awarded 31 major contracts - ie FEED, SURF and EPC jobs- in the period from 2010 to 2013. Following is Nexen with 18 contracts awarded related to the Golden Eagle complex (28/22).

Subjects that continue to be brought up here and exercise minds elsewhere are EDUCATION AND TRAINING. In the UK, as in many western countries, there is a distinct dearth of school-age students planning to go into engineering.

There are ongoing initiatives to get more students to take up engineering places at university, but apparently the problem is much deeper.

Patrick Phelan, managing director of Aquaterra (and ex-MD at JDR), told SEN that he had been on a committee looking at this issue and the problem is that there are not enough students doing physics at school. No physics, no entry for an enginering place at university. Simple as that.

It is time to send the celebrity physicists into schools to talk to pre-exam students to encourage them into the world of Newton and Einstein. Sadly, the other problem, according to Phelan, is poor career advice in schools. That is a tough nut to crack.

The subsea production hardware sector is not short of work, so a new player could take some pressure off the big boys. SEN was told that PROSERV has pre-qualified – its first outside the Gulf of Mexico - for Tullow’s Banda long distance (74km) gas tieback to shore in Mauritania.

The job is for an integrated system: five xmas trees - one is a spare - plus controls and a manifold. Proserv has bid its simple 10K concentric monobore trees.

One of the unspoken benefits for the new ONESUBSEA organisation will be growth in the sales of multiphase meters. The Framo facility in Bergen has the capacity to manufacture 200 units per annum, although it is currently supplying around 80.