If the fields which have helped to fuel Britain for 50 years can become a store for carbon molecules, the North Sea can remain central to the country’s energy needs for decades to come
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskSt Fergus is part of a vast infrastructure which has been built beside, into and under the North Sea over the past 50 years. Oil and gas drawn up from beneath the sea floor powers cars and heats homes; about 80% of the gas used in Britain comes from these offshore fields .
To see how it might do so, look to the first North Sea project to be given the go-ahead since the invasion of Ukraine. On June 1st the government approved plans by Shell, a giant energy company, to develop the Jackdaw gasfield some 270km off the coast from St Fergus. The gas is due to start flowing by 2025.
Domestic production also creates jobs in Britain and generates revenue for the Treasury. The go-ahead on Jackdaw came just six days after the government announced an “Energy Profits Levy”, better known as a windfall tax, which imposes a 25% surcharge on extraordinary profits being made by the oil-and-gas sector. The £5bn in extra receipts that the government expects to generate will help pay for schemes to assist households with sky-high energy bills.
This tension, between funding cost-of-living interventions and encouraging domestic energy supply, is dwarfed by another—the conflict between extracting oil and gas from the North Sea and meeting a legal requirement for Britain to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The government says it will run all new projects through a “climate checkpoint” to ensure that their emissions are suitably low.
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