Green energy, by contrast, is still relatively young.
The UK Labour government says “homegrown renewables” – that is, domestically generated energy and heat from sources like wind and solar – have gone from generating around 7% of electricity in 2010 to more than 50% today.
But the road to that point has been a rocky one.
Over the past decade, the UK’s oil and gas workforce, about half of which is based in Scotland, has fallen by 70,000 to 115,000, according to Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University.
In the same period, he adds, only 39,000 posts have been created in renewables.
He says fiscal instability, with “five tax changes in four years”, has damaged confidence in the UK North Sea, with many investors shifting their money elsewhere, including to Norway.
Industry leaders have been lobbying the Chancellor Rachel Reeves to move to a system under which windfall taxes only apply when the oil price is above a certain threshold.
“Oil and gas is declining faster than many of us were expecting, but the renewables industry is simply not ready to take all the jobs,” says de Leeuw, who predicts that between 600 and 800 posts will be lost in oil and gas every month for the next five or 10 years.
With around a quarter of all the UK’s energy jobs based in north-east Scotland, the net loss has, in turn, already harmed builders, taxi drivers, lawyers, accountants and hospitality staff in the region, says Russell Borthwick of Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce.
As well as changes to oil and gas taxation, he wants to see measures to encourage the further growth of renewables, such as upgrading the UK’s electricity grid and speeding up planning for windfarms.
“We need to build a bridge from the old North Sea to the new North Sea,” argues Borthwick.
But doing that will require significant societal change, says Dr Ewan Gibbs, an expert in energy policy at Glasgow University.