Gordon Brown’s announcement in Banchory last week that he plans to increase North Sea oil production by up to 70,000 barrels a day was confirmation, if any were needed, that the country is in the grip of a fuel crisis.

In the space of five months, the oil price has climbed from $100 to $135 a barrel. Rising energy costs are affecting motorists, consumers and businesses, forcing people to think twice before driving to the shops, filling up their cars or turning up the central heating. By the end of the year, annual gas bills could cost more than £1,000.

In an attempt to alleviate the pressure, the prime minister confirmed that two new North Sea developments, West Don and Don South West, would come on stream early next year, producing, at their peak, up to 50,000 barrels a day. Extra oil and gas fields could also be carved out of unprofitable parts of around 30 existing fields, yielding an additional 20,000 barrels a day.

Such an increase, however, is still just a tiny fraction of the 1.8m barrels consumed daily in the UK.

As our domestic habits begin to change and talk turns towards inflation taking a hold in the wake of a sustained increase in the price of oil, I embarked on an investigation into Scotland’s relationship with the “black gold”.

It’s worth remembering that Britain is a significant oil producing nation. In fact, it produces more oil than Kuwait. Yet, south of Aberdeen, the country’s oil capital, it seems very few people know or appreciate that.

Alex Salmond highlighted the issue last week when he claimed there was “fury” in Scotland that revenues from North Sea oil continue to flood into the Treasury while Scots are left struggling with soaring prices at the pumps.

The question of ownership, however, could soon be redundant.

Environmentalists and some oil experts have been predicting the demise of oil since the 1950s. A few believe that global oil production is perilously close to peaking and from then on, supplies will dwindle away to nothing.

In time-honoured tradition, however, no two experts agree about the life expectancy of the reserves off Scotland’s shores. Jeremy Leggett, chairman of Solarcentury, an energy consultancy, predicts the crunch will come as soon as 2010. Others, including Professor Peter O’Dell of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, dismiss such ominous predictions and claim that supplies of oil will flow for decades to come.

O’Dell estimates that only about half of the available oil from the North Sea has been extracted so far and he holds out the prospect of new finds in parts of the UK continental shelf that have never been examined in any depth.

This view would appear to be supported by the announcement last month that Dana Petroleum found a new oil field in the North Sea at West Rinnes.

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