The UK government has admitted in court that its approval of the giant Rosebank oilfield off Shetland was unlawful. Government lawyer Chris Pirie KC accepted at an Edinburg court that the previous Conservative administration did not include “the effects on climate of the combustion of oil and gas to be extracted from the fields.”
Controversy over new drilling licenses for oilfields in the UK has been ongoing for the past couple of years. Last year, the United Kingdom’s North Sea Transition Authority approved the development of the Rosebank field by owners Equinor ASA (NYSE:EQNR) and Ithaca Energy, with former Prime Minister Riki Sunak’s government arguing that projects such as these are necessary to bolster domestic oil and gas production, lower costs for consumers, and provide “energy security” as the country transitions to low-carbon energy. However, an analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit revealed that new oil projects, such as Rosebank, will add less than 1% of the petrol used in the UK’s cars within seven years but will come at a high reputational cost for a country that’s currently regarded as one of the continent’s green energy leaders.
“It doesn’t help with security of supply, because oil and gas are part of international markets and 80 percent of the oil is exported and processed overseas and who knows where it ends up as fuels,” Dr. Simon Cran-McGreehin, head of analysis at ECIU, has told The National.
Even if the UK hoarded everything it produced, it still wouldn’t meet the country’s energy needs, according to Cran-McGreehin.
“There’s not enough of it anymore; we currently use more oil than we produce in the North Sea so we’d have to import some anyway. It comes at the expense of the UK’s reputation as, what we used to say, a climate leader,” he said.
The UK’s indigenous crude oil production in 2022 clocked in at ~320,000 barrels per day, enough for just 20% of the country’s consumption. To exacerbate matters, only 13% of that oil is refined in the country, a figure the ECIU has projected will fall to 1% by 2030 as North Sea production continues to decline.
Source: By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com