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@andyfallsoff
@Lebowski
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it is full of difficulties and probably very expensive. I'm also not sure that the comments about expertise don't understate the difficulty. We pay off BP to get out of the licensing agreement - we don't nationalise BP, so not clear we do get all their staff. And even if we did, the individual staff members don't retain all the knowledge (or bring the physical equipment with them). A load of technical info will be commercially valuable and will belong to BP - it isn't going to be no difficulty at all to recreate and obtain that info.
I'm not some sort of "nothing should be in public hands" Thatcherist but I think it's easier to glibly say "oh well we could just keep those profits instead" rather than thinking about how difficult / expensive it might actually be. And is that really our strategy - we want to phase out fossil fuels, so now is the time for our state to invest huge resources in learning how to extract oil?
Might it not just make more sense to try and ensure we get a better share of the profit, use that to address the short term issue, and look for other sources of energy going forward?