Yesterday’s budget confirms Labour’s plans to drain the North Sea dry of oil and gas

Following yesterday’s Autumn Budget, the UK government has confirmed rumours that it will grant companies permission to pump the North Sea dry of its remaining oil and gas.

Back in September, the Canary reported that energy secretary Ed Miliband was looking for loopholes to enable the UK to wring as much oil from the North Sea as possible. That’s in spite of the fact that Labour’s manifesto held that it wouldn’t grant new licenses for new oil and gas fields.

Confirming a calamity

The Guardian reported that this could take the form of ‘bespoke’ licences for companies to explore sites which were previously deemed unprofitable. Miliband’s team was also reportedly drawing up plans to permit companies to use so-called ‘tie-backs’. This is the name for the use of existing sites to probe new sections of seabed close-by. The oil industry estimates that this could yield as many as 7 billion extra barrels of fossil fuel.

Yesterday, the UK government put out a statement confirming that “the North Sea will continue to power Britain for many decades to come”. It lamented declining oil and gas reserves over last 20 years, and the accompanying 70,000 lost jobs lost of the last decade. And, of course, it promised that it would act now to secure the long-term future of North Sea energy.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband said:

The North Sea’s workers and communities have helped power our country and our world for decades. This is our plan to ensure they continue to do so for many decades to come.

This is a world-leading plan with workers, unions, businesses, and communities at its heart, and implements in full the government’s manifesto commitments. It is a plan which will ensure that the North Sea is an energy powerhouse throughout the twenty first century.

‘No new exploration’, except…

The problem with all of this is that securing the future of North Sea energy risks the future of… the future. Sure, the plan won’t actually issue new licences to explore new oil and gas fields. It even acknowledges the huge weight of science stating that new fossil fuel exploration is incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C.

However, Labour is treating that dire warning like a child told not to step one foot into a room. Instead, they’re crawling in on their hands and knees. The government will introduce what it’s calling ‘Transitional Energy Certificates’, which permit oil and gas production “on or near to existing fields”.

Sure, that follows the letter of ‘no new exploration’. However, the government statement specified that the certificates are valid for production that’s “already part of or links back to existing fields and infrastructure”. That ‘links back to’ is significant – it’s the ‘tie-backs’ we reported on two months ago. Essentially, companies won’t need to create new oil fields – they’ll just expand the area that the old oil fields applied to. Fucking genius.

Carbon capture will surely save us

The statement also boasted £9.4 billion government backing for carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCS) projects. This includes funding for Acorn and Viking projects in Scotland and the Humber. Add to this a bump of at least £5.8 billion from the National Wealth Fund over this Parliament to invest in hydrogen, ‘green steel’ and, yes, carbon capture again, as announced back in July.

The problem here is that CCS simply isn’t proven to work. As the Canary’s Hannah Sharland reported:

CCS is the fossil fuel industry’s latest greenwashing con for continuing on its polluting business-as-usual. Companies capture carbon emissions from large-scale industrial installations, and then pump it underground – for instance, in depleted oil and gas wells.

The technology isn’t proven at the kind of scale the government wants to use it for. For example, Desmog conducted a study of twelve large-scale fossil fuel industry-run CCS plants. Notably, the outlet identified:

a litany of missed carbon capture targets; cost-overruns, and billions of dollars of costs to taxpayers in the form of subsidies.

So, here’s what Labour are gambling the future of everything on. Unproven carbon-capture technology, offsetting emissions from a potential 7 billion barrels of North Sea Oil.

Unfortunately, the Earth will not know that actually, we got that oil from a tie-back. It definitely doesn’t count as a new oil field, because it was right next to an old oil field. Its not fair that the ice is melting, we technically kept all our manifesto pledges. God help us all.

Featured image via the Canary