Over the past year thousands of North Sea jobs have been axed by an oil industry reeling from low oil prices.

The scale of the challenge facing the sector is clear from the latest Scottish Government forecasts for North Sea oil revenues, published on Thursday. Predicted total revenues are between £2.4 billion and £15.8bn in the four years to 2018/19, compared with last year's forecasts of between £15.8bn and £38.7bn.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and industry trade body Oil and Gas UK have been cheer leaders in the frenzied media demand for cost-cutting measures to be put in place across the sector. The recommendations that emerged from the Wood Review of February 2014 were recognised by Oil and Gas UK as a potential game changer.

Perhaps the review's most significant outcome has been the creation of a new regulator, the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA). To help maximise economic recovery (MER) from the remaining North Sea oil reserves, the regulator has been empowered to force operators to disclose their plans and then act in a co-operative and collegial way with adjacent operators. These powers would extend to removing drilling licences from operators.

This conjures up a mental image of operators shedding their padded jackets and their hard hats to take part in a soiree where they all share plans, seismic data, drilling equipment, rigs and pipe lines. It won't happen. It is an oil pipe dream. Why?

First, the Wood Review's recommendations were prepared on the actions deemed necessary to save the industry when oil was at $114 a barrel and not $65 a barrel. This was based on outdated forecast data from Oil and Gas UK and the DECC dating back to 2012. More importantly, it failed to seek the views of lawyers who might just have an opinion on the legal implications of the regulator interfering in the commercial decision-making of the oil companies they represent. It even failed to define what it meant by MER yet produced a report on it.

Secondly, the oil industry does not disclose commercially sensitive information to its competitors. In these times of marginal or negative returns in the North Sea it is wishful thinking to believe that the oil leopards will change their spots. It is much more likely that they will be stalking their prey with a view to takeover, or overstating the value of their assets in the hope of attracting a bid from a naive foreign national oil company.

Thirdly, in granting the industry 50 per cent relief from the impending cost of decommissioning without tying that concession to a requirement to stay the course and recoup every viable barrel of oil from ageing fields, the UK Government has been at best cavalier with public money and at worst irresponsible; it is now difficult to cajole or pressurise the tier one companies to operate in the way suggested by the Oil and Gas Authority.

Fourth, is this body really something new? The North Sea industry has, under the direction of Oil and Gas UK, failed to establish efficiencies in its operations through long-established committees such as PILOT, as evidenced by OGA's war cry to the industry to seek those self-same operational efficiencies.

Fifthly, OGA is an expensive remedy with its chairman and directors being paid eye-watering salaries that have been justified as being necessary to attract the right personnel. Surely that argument can equally apply to any worker in the North Sea. And if contractor rates are being slashed and the working conditions of offshore personnel unilaterally changed, the sight of a good-sized coterie of well-paid managers lording it over the industry will be viewed negatively by offshore workers.

Finally, the OGA is sponsored by the DECC. Is it simply yet another committee comprised in essence of staff who in a previous existence would have been in charge of sections within DECC? Is the OGA a prime example of a body attempting to prevent HRM's North Sea Oil Titanic from sinking by rearranging the DECC Chairs?

What is the alternative to Wood and OGA? Rather than paying lip service to the devolution of powers to Holyrood, the one vital step that should take is the clear handover of control to the Scottish Parliament of all economic activity that takes place on Scottish land and on Scottish offshore regions. Such a move could yet secure the future of the North Sea oil industry and hold back the decommissioning phase.

Alex Russell is Professor of Petroleum Accounting and

Peter Strachan is Professor of Energy Policy, both at Robert Gordon University.