The oil and gas industry may provide opportunities for all, but what if you have the skills and aptitude to work in the energy sources sector but don't want the carbon-heavy conscience?

Even the US is taking note of climate change these days and British companies are also starting to pay attention, albeit slowly. Whatever you think of Tony Blair's carbon offsetting plans, they are indicative of a political and environmental issue that is moving further and further up the agenda.

"Climate change is now everywhere," says Daniel Letch, a wind project developer for Green Peninsula, a company that develops wind turbine projects and advises big companies with land assets how to "green up their act", as he puts it. He is keen to emphasise that wind should not be thought of as alternative or secondary to conventional means of energy production. Many of his organisation's clients are FTSE 100 companies for whom a wind turbine on site makes economic sense.

Alison Hill, the head of communications at the British Wind Energy Association, agrees that wind turbines can be a sound business plan, but on an even larger scale. "Two years ago the UK moved from being a net exporter to a net importer of oil and gas," she says. "We must build up our own portfolio. It makes economic and environmental sense as well as producing individual opportunities."

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Background

• The message is clear

• Business takes the green route

• How to... be an active eco-worker

• How to be a responsible leader

Background

• Rapid growth in green jobs

• It is cool to be green

• Busy saving the world

• Oxford cultivates green valley effect

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• Snakes & Ladders

Letch is one of a wave of specialists to benefit from the wealth of new opportunities, having taken a BSc in renewable energy accredited by the Energy Institute at the University of Exeter. He went on the course after a career in special effects, a background that helped with the engineering aspects of the degree.

"I didn't have engineering qualifications per se," he says. "I'd learnt a lot on the job -it wasn't computer graphics. It was making buildings fall down, building hydraulics and putting up big rigs." He says that everyone on his course (there were eight of them) who wanted a job in the renewable energy sector got to where they wanted to be straight after the course.

The wind sector is growing at a fair pace, 50 per cent a year in the UK according to Hill, who believes that water-based generation technology will soon catch up. "Tidal is still at the research and development stage," she says. "After 2010 we should be able to start generating electricity that way."

E.ON, the energy company, is determined not to miss that particular boat. Fiona Auty, E.ON's lead marine developer, heads a team of four whose remit is to establish two small-scale wave and tidal projects to find out what future the technology has. They are also starting a commercial-scale project to find out how the industry is likely to work and to develop business contacts.

"Wave and tidal energy have the potential to be huge," she says. "We're an island; we've got plenty of sea to play with. We've had a good heritage with shipbuilding and with oil and gas." That experience, she thinks, will be useful to the development of marine technology. "We put job adverts out and were overwhelmed with responses."

Perhaps this is because sea technology is seen as green and exciting. Not so another growing alternative energy industry -liquified petroleum gas (LPG). "There is a crying need for mechanics who can do LPG conversions to the point where we're recruiting from abroad," says Noel Lock, a director of The Greenfuel Company, that converts cars to LPG, a byproduct of the extraction and refining of oil. However, he believes that as petrol becomes scarcer, there will be a "global prerogative" for the industry to grow. In the future, he says, "the opportunities for people who want to be involved in this type of industry will be there".