Around 10,000 offshore gas and oil workers are spending today and the rest of the Christmas and New Year holiday far out on the dark seas around Britain’s coasts, providing the energy to heat homes, cook turkeys, and power fairy lights.
As most people are eating, drinking and open presenting with family and friends, this vast army of men and women will be making sure the heat and power is there to make it all happen, working on gas and oil installations that can be more than 200 miles from the UK mainland.
This workforce helps to supply the daily average of 265 million cubic metres of gas we need on Christmas Day and each of the following days of the Christmas break to cook our food, heat our homes and run the 35 gas-fired power stations that remain the backbone of the UK’s electricity generating system.
Among the hundreds of teams involved is 51-year-old Andy Pulford, managing a Christmas workforce of 90 and a complex of 23 gas wells around Spirit Energy’s massive Morecambe Bay central processing complex.
This installation produces enough gas to meet the annual needs of 700,000 homes extracting gas from more than half a mile below the seabed.
Two days before Christmas Andy said goodbye to his primary schoolteacher wife Hannah, 43, and sons George, 11, and William, eight, and embarked on the six-hour drive from his home outside Norwich to a helicopter platform in Blackpool, Lancs, from where he routinely flies to his offshore office.
“Everyone has a personal story about how they feel being away but what we’re doing is an important job. Work goes on as usual all over Christmas,” he says.
Despite the growth of wind-generated electricity, more than a quarter of the electricity we use nationwide is still generated by gas, and this can go up to 55% on days when there is no wind.
There are still more than 21 million homes in this country that rely on gas for their central heating, and 11 million kitchens that have gas ovens.
Although a vast expanse of waves separates offshore workers from home and loved ones, Christmas on the rigs nowadays is far from a miserable affair.
“When I first started working offshore 18 years ago there was no wifi - just three phone boxes and big queues to use them,” says Andy.
“Now there’s internet and video calling, but people can still feel isolated having Christmas offshore. We don’t want that to happen and we try to keep the crew together as much as we can.
“I always get everyone together on Christmas morning for a chat and run through what’s going to happen. We have snooker, pool and table tennis tournaments, music and quizzes, a raffle with high value fantastic prizes, plus the most fantastic food which I go down into the galley and help serve.”
Food is as much a part of Christmas everywhere offshore as it is at home. Carl Wilson, 40, from Darlington is a former hotel head chef who has spent the past few months carefully planning the menus to be prepared and served by his team of six for a crew of 51 on the energy industry supply ship Erda which recently took part in a successful operation to pump captured carbon for permanent storage in a disused seabed oil well
This Christmas the ship is engaged in decommissioning a disused oil platform in the North Sea off Rotterdam.
Like Andy, Carl had an early Christmas with his wife Lindsey, 43 and their three children Brooke, 15, Ollie,14, and Sienna, 12. He won’t be back until mid-January.
The long Christmas day feast starts before 5am with breakfast for the early shift, then a special brunch for everyone at 11am followed by two sittings for the main multi-choice Christmas dinner in the late afternoon.
“Food is a huge part of general welfare for everybody and at Christmas it's just enhanced to another level,” Carl says. “It ties us all back into that home life, brings everyone together and gives us a chance to show our flair as chefs.
“It’s actually the best time of year for us to really shine. Someone eating your food, praising you and saying nice things about it, is a big part of why we do this job. It’s about pride and passion for food.
“Being away from home at Christmas isn’t easy for anyone, but we know it’s what we all signed up for.”
David Whitehouse, chief executive of Offshore Energies UK. which represents almost 500 member organisations involved in producing energy in UK waters, agrees:
“On Christmas Day many of us will be with family and friends in warm homes. Itis easy to forget that while we are sitting down to lunch there are thousands of offshore workers in UK waters - on rigs, vessels, windfarms and other energy projects -who will be working through the holiday to keep the country powered. We should never take them for granted.”