SlowOne you are correct apart from one point, the north sea oil has not dried up, it is just more expensive to get it out nowadays plus the tax charged by the government forces the bigger companies like BP and Shell to go as far as russia and retreive it. It is actually cheaper to build a new field of platforms in CIS and pump it back than use the existing platforms in the North sea.
That tells me that the government is seriously in trouble when options like this become cheaper
