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What’s happening here, then?
What’s not happening, more like – the government is still not issuing new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Why are we talking about something that isn’t taking place?
You might have noticed the price of energy is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, thanks to all that back-and-forth in the Strait of Hormuz.
If you ask the Tories, Reform and SNP, the government’s next move is simple: get drilling.
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Trade body Offshore Energies UK has said similar, arguing that failing to take advantage of all that flammable stuff under the North Sea leaves us ‘more exposed to global volatility and higher emissions’.
But Energy Secretary Ed Miliband won’t budge. He says reliance on fossil fuel markets is leading the UK ‘exposed’.
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So what are the arguments?
At Prime Minister’s Questions today, Kemi Badenoch set out her side like this:
There’s an untapped gas field 150 miles east of Aberdeen, called Jackdaw. If that untapped field was to be tapped, we’d get enough gas to heat 1.6 million homes. (Shell, the company that wants to operate the field, says 1.4 million but whatever.)
It would also, she suggested, help to bring down energy bills that could spike when the price cap is updated later in the year.
Meanwhile, Labour MP – yes, Labour MP – Henry Tufnell wrote in the Sun on Sunday: ‘Importing oil and gas from foreign facilities that are less carbon-efficient and require long-distance shipping is simply displacing the problem elsewhere and impoverishing our own communities.’
For the counterargument, the government is pointing at the wild ride the prices of oil and gas have taken in the past few weeks.
The only way to cushion the impact in the future, they say, is by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and produce our own energy with renewables and nuclear.
Miliband has said cracking open the new oil and gas fields in the North Sea wouldn’t take a penny off UK energy bills, as the price is set on international markets.
What’s the picture at the moment?
As Keir Starmer pointed out at PMQs, we’re going to be using oil and gas for a very long time to come.
That’ll be the case even if we achieve net zero by 2030 as the government is aiming to do, since gas is the back-up when it’s not windy enough to turn wind turbines.
And the high price of our gas illustrates the government’s point about us being at the mercy of international markets.
That’s because we only get a tiny fraction of our gas supply from the Gulf, where all the trouble is happening. The vast majority comes from Norway, our own North Sea supply, and the US.
Most of our imported crude oil is from the US and Norway, while most of our imported petrol comes from the Netherlands and the US.
The government says the shift to renewable and nuclear energy additionally makes sense because the North Sea is maturing and has been in decline for more than 20 years, so we should get well-prepared for a future where we can’t rely on what’s beneath it.
Oh, and a quick afterthought to all this chat about prices and markets: our use of fossil fuels is also driving a catastrophic global climate crisis which threatens human civilisation.
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