Britain gives green light to North Sea gas extraction, protests fail

The British government has approved plans to extract gas from the Jackdaw field in the North Sea, news agencies report. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said gas from the site, located about 240 kilometres east of Aberdeen, Scotland, could start flowing to customers as soon as this coming winter. The project was planned by the previous Conservative government and had been the subject of debate for months.

Extraction will keep hundreds of people in work and “millions of households will be warm this winter,” Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham said. With people having to cope with the high cost of living, he said, it is necessary to think responsibly about how best to use Britain’s energy resources.

Burnham assured the public that his government supports generating energy from renewable sources and remains committed to its plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. “Although we have embarked on an ambitious climate pathway, we will need oil and gas in the decades ahead,” he said.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly urged the British government to expand extraction in the North Sea and help bring down energy prices, Reuters reports. Resource extraction in the area peaked in the late 1990s and has been in decline ever since.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh said, according to Reuters, that the start of operations at the Jackdaw field would increase domestic natural gas production by up to six per cent. Production is expected to continue for up to eleven years. The government will establish a new fund to invest revenue from gas and oil sales in the climate transition, she said.

The question of new extraction in the North Sea is dividing Labour. It pits climate goals against efforts to use domestic resources and curb the rising cost of living. AFP notes that when Labour came to power the year before last, it pledged not to issue new licences for oil and natural gas extraction and said it wanted to steer Britain towards renewable energy.

Supporters of the Jackdaw and Rosebank projects say they are not new. The previous Conservative government had already approved extraction from the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields, but work did not begin because of protracted legal disputes. The necessary infrastructure has even been built at the Jackdaw field. The project is operated by Adura, a joint venture between energy giant Shell and Norwegian company Equinor.

The government has not yet given the green light to extraction at the Rosebank field, which lies west of the Shetland Islands and contains mainly oil.

The left-wing Greens called the government’s decision “climate vandalism,” Reuters reports. Environmental organisation Greenpeace said it showed that “our energy policy is still controlled by people lobbying for fossil fuels.” AFP reports that opponents of new extraction argue consumers will see no change in their energy bills, because the cost of electricity and gas is determined by prices on global markets.