§ Mr. HardyTo ask the President of the Board of Trade what is his estimate of the proportion of the United Kingdom oil and gas reserves which have so far been taken from offshore fields.
§ Mr. Eggar[holding answer 24 November 1992]: Section 2.4 and table 7 of the Brown Book (Development of the Oil and Gas Resources of the United Kingdom) published in April 1992 set out my Department's latest estimate, at 31 December 1991, of total potential recoverable reserves of oil and gas in the United Kingdom. These showed that remaining reserves could be up to 3.9 times as much as cumulative production to the same date in the case of oil and up to 4.2 times as much in the case of gas.