We are taken upstairs to a conference room, and, coffee cups filled, we sit at the big table.

The company's regional president for Europe and West Africa stands up and makes a few introductory remarks.

"Welcome to Conoco Phillips; welcome to Stavanger. I have not met any of you before... save for Jamie Stone, who I well remember when we worked together on the Conoco Hutton project at Nigg."

What?

My goodness, of course... Paul Warwick, who I remember all those years ago as a welding engineer.

Talk about someone who has done well in the world!

I was both astonished and delighted to meet him again. And it just goes to prove that you never know who might go very far.

I could say a great deal about my visit to the Offshore Northern Seas (ONS) event in Norway last week. Indeed in last week's edition of this newspaper I was quoted on Norway's enlightened approach to fuel pricing in remote areas. We have a lot to learn from them.

I could, and should, make mention of my repeated questioning on the fronts of tidal energy and marine-based wind turbines (like the two windmills you can see beside the Beatrice platform as you drive down the coast from Caithness).

On both fronts I heard it again and again – it can happen... it must happen – but it is going to take really significant UK and Scottish Government financial investment.

I guess that this is the real question for Alex Salmond when he comes to Caithness later this month. £££ – how much? We shall see.

But it was a guy from Aberdeen that really made me think.

Having met with the big oil and gas companies and the Norwegian energy minister, it was suggested that the MPs and MSPs might like to be taken on a tour of some of the smaller companies with stands at the conference centre, some of the success stories that would be instructive for the politicians.

Now, having worked at Nigg – and Kishorn and Sullom Voe – I knew what a flange connection was (two pipes bolted together, making a longer pipe), but the man from Aberdeen, and the tools he had invented for putting together and taking apart flange connections, really impressed me.

He told us of the difficulties and costs of patenting his invention in various countries (particularly Russia), he told us that his sales were set to double, and, this was what made me think, he told me that he had recently relocated his business to Aberdeen's new science and business park.

Why? Because it was perfectly designed for his needs, just what the business needed in terms of buildings, services and communications.

This new location would be crucial in helping the business grow.

I then asked him if he was experiencing any problems, other than the Russians holding up the paperwork. He thought for a second or two, and then he replied.

"Engineers, qualified engineers. Some are going for salaries touching 75 grand, and the big companies snap them up before us wee ones can get a look in."

It was at this point that I lifted my eyes and mentally gazed back across the North Sea to this constituency.

Dounreay is the centre of cutting-edge engineering skills, but as decommissioning continues, we are already seeing highly trained people redeploying out of the Far North, often offshore or to Aberdeen...

Jokingly, half seriously, I asked my flange man what it would have taken him to move his business to the North.

"Och, I suppose communications would be fine – after all it's all e-mail and broadband these days – but I'm not moving from where I am now. It's just grand."

So, I won't be able to do this before this month's conference about the economic future of the Far North (and the First Minister's speech in Thurso), but I have asked my office to arrange for me to visit the Aberdeen science and business park.

I want to see for myself exactly how Aberdeen has done what it has done – and if this success could be replicated in this constituency.

We have the skills, we have the money (but not the amount, as I say above, to make tidal energy production happen), and, with what we already have, we should be able to take a leaf out of Aberdeen's book.

I have said, many many times now, that I would not have stayed, and worked, and brought up a family, in the place I come from if it hadn't been for Nigg.

For thousands the same is true of Dounreay. We all know this.

This is why encouraging businesses, like my flange man's, to come north is what it is all about.

And as for my one-time Nigg colleague, Paul Warwick, he has promised to look in and have a chat the next time he is in Edinburgh.

We shall talk about the old days... and you can be sure that I'll pick his brains regarding future oil-related business opportunities in this constituency.

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