The UK government must soon decide whether to give consent to two oil and gasfields: Rosebank in the North Atlantic and Jackdaw in the North Sea. Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces pressure from the oil and gas industry and unions on one side, and environmentalists on the other, amid energy supply insecurity and evidence of the climate crisis.
Labour's manifesto commitment not to approve new drilling licences offers little help because both fields already have licences, granted by the previous Conservative government in 2022 and 2023. However, last year Edinburgh's court of session ruled that the environmental impact assessments on which this decision relied were unlawful. The court said the Conservative government had failed to include emissions generated when the oil and gas from the fields is burned. Work could continue, but a new assessment had to be done and approval sought again.
Two fields, two different cases
The issue facing the new energy and climate secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is whether the additional information on the fields' global emissions alters the grounds for consent. Although invariably discussed together, the two fields are very different.
Jackdaw is a small gasfield with a production life of only 11 years. Its total carbon emissions will be only around 24m tonnes, equating annually to around 0.8% of the UK's total emissions. The gas would be piped into the UK and consumed domestically, likely displacing dirtier liquified natural gas (LNG) imported from the US, making a small contribution to energy security and emissions reduction.
By contrast, Rosebank is a large oilfield with a 25-year life, generating around 250m tonnes of carbon emissions during that time. The oil would be sent to the Netherlands for refining since the UK no longer has the appropriate capacity, and very little, if any, is likely to be used in the UK. So it would not contribute to energy security.
CCS as a condition of consent
Rosebank could be given consent while avoiding these consequences if the government required it to pay for some or all of its emissions to be captured and stored in disused oilfields or saline aquifers. Most of Rosebank's emissions will occur when its oil is burned, so making carbon capture and storage (CCS) a condition of its licence would effectively mean requiring it to pay to capture and store the equivalent volume of other producers' emissions.
CCS is a proven technology: one of Rosebank's owners, Equinor, has been using CCS in its Norwegian Sleipner field since 1996 and is reported to have stored over 20m tonnes of CO2 without leakage. The UK government's own CCS programme, operated by the North Sea Transition Authority, has licensed 21 CCS projects at different stages of development, but Rosebank is not one of them.
Giving consent to Rosebank on condition that it pays for its emissions to be captured and stored – say, from 2035 onwards – is the only way to make it compatible with the UK government's domestic and international climate change commitments. By joining the UK CCS programme, Rosebank would probably be eligible for government support. The additional costs of CCS might mean that Rosebank's owners would decide not to go ahead, which would merely demonstrate that the project cannot in practice be undertaken in a way consistent with the UK's net zero commitments.
Decommissioning and a transition roadmap
It is also critical that for both Jackdaw and Rosebank the government insists on strict methane limits, as methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and both fields will have significant emissions. The government should make two other announcements at the same time: accelerating the labour-intensive decommissioning of oil and gasfields in the North Sea to secure thousands of jobs, and publishing a net zero transition roadmap explaining how the UK will 'defossilise' its economy over the next 25 years.
Rosebank's and Jackdaw's operators say they will create around 3,500 jobs in development and around 880 in operation. These are not negligible, but they will not save the oil and gas industry or the wider economy of north-east Scotland. Between 2013 and 2023, jobs in the sector fell by more than half, from 441,000 to 213,000, due to the exhaustion of the British North Sea basin – around 90% of the UK's oil and gas has now been extracted.
With around 1,700 wells due to be plugged and abandoned in the next six years and 500 already overdue for removal, decommissioning is a huge task. It is estimated that decommissioning will generate up to 25,000 UK jobs over the next decade and deliver about £6.8bn in economic benefit. A net zero transition roadmap would cover anticipated technological pathways in energy, transport, industry and agriculture, and the implications for businesses and households, reassuring firms, unions and consumers and giving investors much-needed certainty. France has already produced such a roadmap, and other countries are also committed to doing so. Britain should join them.
