East Midlands Oil Province

The East Midlands Oil Province, also known as the East Midlands Petroleum Province, covers the petroliferous geological area across the north-eastern part of the East Midlands of England that has a few small oil fields. The largest field in the province is the Welton oil field, the second largest onshore oil field in the UK.

It comprises Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and northern Leicestershire.

The UK's first oil field was discovered in the East Midlands, at Hardstoft in east Derbyshire in 1919. Prior to this, from 1851, oil shale in the Midland Valley in Scotland was used, until 1962. With North Sea oil, Britain became self-sufficient with oil since the early 1980s, and indeed exported much of this oil. It became a net exporter of oil in 1981, with exports peaking in 1985 and production peaking in 1999. The UK became a net exporter of gas in 1997 and a net importer of gas in 2004, and also a net importer of oil in 2004. UK consumption of petroleum increases each year. Per capita consumption of oil annually is about 1.3 tonnes. The UK has the capacity to refine 92 million tonnes of crude oil a year.

Currently the North Sea is producing around 1.5m barrels of oil a day. The peak was in 2000 at 4.5m a day. The Brent oilfield is being decommissioned. The UKCS has reserves of between 12 - 24bn barrels. In 2014, around 14% of the UK's gas came from Russia via Ukraine.

Until 1990, relatively little oil was produced by UK onshore oil industry. This rapidly increased to peak between 1991 and 1999, where around 5 million tonnes of oil was produced each year - 5.4 million tonnes, the most, was produced in 1996. Since 1999 it has gradually declined to around 1 million tonnes a year. Onshore UK natural gas peaked in 2001. Cumulatively, onshore oil production has produced around 2% (around 500,000,000 barrels (79,000,000 m³)) of offshore (North Sea) production. The Wytch Farm oil field, the largest onshore oilfield in Europe and run by BP, has reserves on its own of around 500,000,000 barrels (79,000,000 m³) of oil. The East Midlands Province provides 11% of UK onshore oil, 65% of the total excluding Wytch farm. So far, the Province has provided around 6 million tonnes of oil. In total, the UK has around 15 million tonnes of onshore oil left.

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