[Earthview Wonders] No.1777: North Sea Oil Field
NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured North Sea Oil Fields. More than 170 oil rigs stand in the North Sea, making it one of the world’s largest offshore oil and gas exploitation sites.
North Sea oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons, comprising liquid petroleum and natural gas, produced from petroleum reservoirs beneath the North Sea. Brent crude is still used today as a standard benchmark for pricing oil, although the contract now refers to a blend of oils from fields in the northern North Sea. When it peaked in 1999, production of North Sea oil was 128 million tonnes per year. However, by 2010 this had halved to under 60 million tonnes/year, and continued declining further, and between 2015 and 2020 has hovered between 40 and 50 million tonnes/year, at around 35% of the 1999 peak. From 2005 the UK became a net importer of crude oil, and as production declined, the amount imported has slowly risen to ~20 million tonnes per year by 2020.
The local scenery on the ground is as follows.
Reference: NASA Earth’s Tweet
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