The city caught in the middle of the big energy shift debate When Iona Macdonald graduated from Aberdeen University in 2000 with a degree in chemistry, there was only one show in town.
Iona recalls that she "inevitably slid into the oil and gas industry" where, like thousands of others, she built a successful and lucrative career.
Back then, the sector was swimming in money, she remembers.
"You would see a lot of Ferraris and Lamborghinis," says Macdonald of Aberdeen at the time.
But after a quarter of a century, that journey - working both on and offshore as a production chemist and later a training manager - came to an abrupt halt when she was made redundant two years ago.
Having tried and failed to secure employment in the renewable energy sector, the 48-year-old is now working on the minimum wage in a Glasgow pub.
Iona enjoys the job and finds being part of the community worthwhile - but she's conscious she's not using any of her skills and experience.
And she says she isn't alone: "I have friends who've gone from six-figure salaries to stacking shelves in a supermarket overnight." Iona adds: "It's been quite the struggle to transition out of what's a very heavily specialised technical industry." The transition from oil and gas jobs into renewables jobs has been on the lips of many politicians in recent years - including during the current Holyrood election campaign.
Specifically, the talk has been of a "just transition" at the heart of the energy policy - the idea of a smooth and equitable shift of labour from dirty old oil to a bright green future.
UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband presents this as both a moral and practical duty, repeating warnings from climate scientists that burning every last drop of oil will accelerate catastrophic global warming.
"Our position is rooted in a plan for a just transition and a fair-minded analysis of what the science demands", he insisted in a speech on 21 April.
But Iona says she has not experienced a just transition.
Nor, she says, have thousands of other workers in the industry.
So what has gone wrong for her and others? Are Scotland and the UK fumbling the shift away from oil and gas jobs? And, if so, what does that mean for places like Aberdeen, the wider economy and even the future of the UK itself? Silver darlings and black gold Aberdeen has always looked to the sea, from medieval trade with Scandinavia to landing and processing millions of barrels of herring during the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The "silver darlings", as they were known, brought wealth but it was the discovery of black gold in 1969 which transformed the city and the nation.
"The nightlife was very vibrant," recalls Iona of her time in the industry there three decades on.
"There was a lot of drinking and eating and partying." Extracting oil and gas could be dirty and dangerous but huge profits drove up wages, property prices and the standard of living in north-east Scotland.
There were busts as well as booms - oil has always been a volatile commodity - but on the whole Aberdeen prospered, with the Granite City acquiring a new nickname: Europe's oil capital.
We now know that North Sea production peaked just as the young chemist was embarking on her career, reaching 4.5 million barrels of oil (or equivalent) per day (BOE) in 1999.
Today's North Sea is what geologists call a mature and declining basin.
Production in 2024 was just over one million BOE.
Green energy, by contrast, is still relatively young.
The UK Labour government says "homegrown renewables" - that is, domestically generated energy and heat from sources like wind and solar - have gone from generating around 7% of electricity in 2010 to more than 50% today.
But the road to that point has been a rocky one.
Over the past decade, the UK's oil and gas workforce, about half of which is based in Scotland, has fallen by 70,000 to 115,000, according to Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University.
In the same period, he adds, only 39,000 posts have been created in renewables.
He says fiscal instability, with "five tax changes in four years", has damaged confidence in the UK North Sea, with many investors shifting their money elsewhere, including to Norway.
Industry leaders have been lobbying the Chancellor Rachel Reeves to move to a system under which windfall taxes only apply when the oil price is above a certain threshold.
"Oil and gas is declining faster than many of us were expecting, but the renewables industry is simply not ready to take all the jobs," says de Leeuw, who predicts that between 600 and 800 posts will be lost in oil and gas every month for the next five or 10 years.
With around a quarter of all the UK's energy jobs based in north-east Scotland, the net loss has, in turn, already harmed builders, taxi drivers, lawyers, accountants and hospitality staff in the region, says Russell Borthwick of Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce.
As well as changes to oil and gas taxation, he wants to see measures to encourage the further growth of renewables, such as upgrading the UK's electricity grid and speeding up planning for windfarms.
"We need to build a bridge from the old North Sea to the new North Sea," argues Borthwick.
But doing that will require significant societal change, says Dr Ewan Gibbs, an expert in energy policy at Glasgow University.
If we want to move towards renewables, he says, we need to be getting rid of petrol-powered cars and gas-fired heating systems far more rapidly.
And so far, he says, "the transition hasn't happened, not just in terms of jobs, but actually in terms of the electrification of the British and Scottish economy".
Net zero under attack But there are still some powerful supporters of fossil fuels who scoff at the very idea of a transition to greener power.
Indeed, critics of Scotland's shift to renewables go all the way up to the White House.
In a social media post on 14 April, US President Donald Trump urged the UK to "DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!!", adding: "AND, NO MORE WINDMILLS!" "Europe is desperate for Energy, and yet the United Kingdom refuses to open North Sea Oil, one of the greatest fields in the World.
Tragic!!! Aberdeen should be booming," wrote the....
