Agenda:

The well is probably three or four kilometres deep and may be drilled in thousands of metres of water. It is drilled at an angle, so the actual length of the hole is closer to five kilometres.

The target the driller is aiming for may be a layer only 10 metres thick and invisible to seismic data, the best means we have for imaging the subsurface. The driller is "flying blind".

Once the reservoir layer is successfully located, the crew will line the hole with steel pipe and cement to stop it collapsing.

Miss getting that cement into every nook and cranny and the well can blow out (think Deep Water Horizon). Holes are then punched in the casing in exactly the right place to tap into the reservoir, and oil and gas are brought to the surface where they need to be separated from other fluids.

This normally happens on platforms, vast "cities in the ocean" that include the largest movable structures ever built. Once separated, the fluids are then pumped back to the mainland in pipelines, laid by remote-operated vehicles in extreme water depths too deep for divers.

This is offshore oil production in the 21st century and it is one of the pinnacles of science and engineering. Back in the 1960s when oil was first discovered in the North Sea, nothing the industry had previously done could prepare it for the stormy waters ahead.

But the prize was big and the fledgling Scottish industry went to work solving the unsolvable. Within a generation, we were producing oil and supplying energy to the world from one of the harshest environments on Earth.

Scotland and Aberdeen have been at the centre of these developments since the start. The city hosts all of the major oil companies that, along with several thousand service and engineering companies, make up the financial backbone of the country. Last year the Scottish oil industry had a turnover of £20 billion with half of that coming from exports.

And the industry continues to grow. A recent Scottish Government report highlighted that "international sales by the Scottish oil and gas supply chain have more than doubled in 10 years and Scottish companies now operate in over 100 countries".

Home-grown success stories such as the Wood Group, which started in oilfield services in 1982 using spare fishing boats to supply rigs and grew to a $1bn company operating in 50 countries, give an insight to the future of the industry.

While there is plenty of oil left in the North Sea, the future of the industry lies beyond our shores. The expertise gleaned from the North Sea is exported globally.

No longer are these companies servicing only the local industry; as established leaders, they work across the globe, generating income and jobs for Scotland. Travel to any oilfield in the world and it's likely you will hear a Scot or see the logos of Aberdeen-based companies.

Looking ahead, these home-grown industries will undoubtedly fair better under an independent Scottish Parliament that sees value in promoting and exporting its expertise to the world than with a Westminster obsessed with the casino economics of world banking.

In addition to servicing the world's oilfields, Scotland also has one of the world's largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) research networks. We can take the expertise that was developed for producing oil to develop the only workable, short-term solution to the climate challenges we face.

And, in the longer term, as we make the transition to renewables, who better to put tidal turbines on the sea bed, or build wind farms that will withstand the harsh conditions offshore, than the people who built the great cities in the ocean? As a colleague said to me recently: "It's just engineering - we did it once we will do it again."