Sir Ian Wood, Aberdeen businessman who built energy giant, dies

Sir Ian Wood, the Aberdeen-born businessman who turned his family’s boat repair firm into Wood Group and helped build North Sea energy wealth, has died. Born and educated in Aberdeen, he graduated from Aberdeen University in 1964 with a first-class honours degree in psychology before building one of Scotland’s most influential industrial companies.

Wood saw the opportunity in North Sea oil about 40 years before his retirement, and BBC said he left Wood Group as a global leader in its field. By the time he stepped down, his family fortune was worth more than £1bn, a measure of how deeply one regional industrial fortune had been tied to Britain’s offshore energy economy and to Aberdeen’s own rise as an oil city.

That wealth later fed directly into civic life. Wood chaired The Wood Foundation, pledged in 2015 to The Giving Pledge, and linked his name to Opportunity North East, the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative and wider support for Scottish education. On the Giving Pledge page, he said: “My family and I have always shared the view that, in this global world, we have an underlying responsibility for each other...”

The Wood Foundation spent £2.5m on a seven-year effort to improve science teaching in Scottish primary schools, BBC reported in 2016, part of a broader effort to put private money into institutions that public budgets had strained. In January 2025, the foundation said Wood’s dedication to Scotland’s young people had created a legacy of “transformational change” in education, equipping future generations.

His influence reached well beyond philanthropy. BBC said in 2013 that he was to lead a review of the UK oil and gas industry, underlining the weight his voice carried in a sector that shaped jobs, tax revenue and investment across the north-east of Scotland. He was also recognised by the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and received a London Scottish lifetime achievement award, markers of a career that moved from Aberdeen workshop roots to the centre of Britain’s energy economy.