Campaigners launch Rosebank legal challenge against fossil fuel firms

A court in Scotland has given the green-light for legal challenges against the climate-wrecking Rosebank oilfield project in the North Sea.

The decision potentially paves the way to ending the project for good. Now, campaign groups Uplift and Greenpeace UK are gearing up to take on the fossil fuel titans still trying to force the destructive project through the courts.

Rosebank judicial reviews

Campaigners have previously estimated that the enormous Rosebank project – situated off the coast of Shetland in the North Sea – will produce over 500m barrels of oil over its lifetime. This would equate to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the 28 lowest-income countries combined.

In September 2023, the UK’s oil and gas regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), granted the license for Equinor and Ithaca Energy to develop the notorious Rosebank oil and gas field.

So, in December 2023, Greenpeace and campaign group Uplift launched judicial reviews against the government over Rosebank. Crucially, this sought to overturn the government’s decision to greenlight the Rosebank project.

Now, the Court of Session in Edinburgh has given them the go-ahead.

Court gives climate campaigners the greenlight

Notably, the court has agreed to hear the campaign groups arguments demonstrating that the development of Rosebank is unlawful. In particular this is because it is not compatible with the government’s plans to meet legally binding climate targets. They plan to detail that this is the case:

• because it ignores the impact of the emissions from burning Rosebank’s oil and gas
• because of a failure by the regulator to be transparent in its reasoning
• And because it would damage a protected area of the North Sea containing diverse marine life.

Crucially, the application articulates how Rosebank is incompatible with the UK’s legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Notably, it would fly in the face of the government’s own key blueprint to do this – its Carbon Budget Delivery Plan. Uplift makes it abundantly clear that Rosebank would make the North Sea oil and gas sector’s decarbonisation targets that form this, impossible to achieve.

The court will confirm the date of the hearing shortly. If Uplift and Greenpeace are successful, the consent is likely to be quashed. In short, it would mean that development would only go ahead if the UK government issued it a new license.

Not dead in the water yet

Of course, approval comes in the context of the Labour government’s recent decision to drop its defence in the case. In doing so, it effectively ceded that the previous Conservative government’s approval of the project was unlawful. This was because the government failed to take into account the impact of the projects’ downstream emissions.

Partly, this was thanks to another Supreme Court ruling against UK Oil and Gas’s plans to drill for crude oil at Horse Hill, in Surrey. This set a precedent that projects must take these downstream emissions into account as part of their environmental statements. Obviously, Equinor and Ithaca have not done this for Rosebank.

Despite the new Labour government’s move, the Canary noted however that it didn’t mean the project was sunk.

For one, the fossil fuel corporations could still fight the case. Unsurprisingly, they promptly announced they would do just that.

If that wasn’t enough, the government press release made great pains to point that:

This litigation does not mean the licences for Jackdaw and Rosebank have been withdrawn.

Of course, the Labour Party has repeatedly refused to ditch the Rosebank oil field. First, in September 2023, Starmer committed to honour the licences for Rosebank.

Then, at the Labour conference in October, shadow decarbonisation minister Sarah Jones confirmed this again during a fringe event that fossil fuel-packed industry body Offshore Energy UK (OEUK) had sponsored. Crucially, OEUK had lobbied for the Rosebank project.

In other words, Rosebank wasn’t dead in the water by any stretch.

Evidence against Rosebank mounting up

Nonetheless, the fact the groups are proceeding with their legal challenges is at least another step towards bringing this gargantuan polluting project to a grinding halt.

Climate lawyer and executive director of Uplift said that:

Rosebank is a bad deal for Britain so it’s a relief that the arguments against it will now get a fair hearing in court. Now the government accepts the decision to approve the field was unlawful, the oil and gas companies that own Rosebank are alone in trying to drive this disastrous project through court.

Rosebank would do nothing to lower bills or boost our energy security as most of its oil would be exported and, because of huge tax breaks for new drilling, the UK public would effectively cover a huge chunk of the costs of developing it. It won’t provide long-term security for oil and gas workers and their communities, who want good clean energy jobs that have a future.

The stakes in this case should not be underestimated. Experts have long warned that there can be no new oil and gas developments if we’re to have a hope of staying within safe climate limits. With every passing month, the evidence against a huge project like Rosebank mounts up, whether that’s months of flooded fields damaging UK food production, or extreme temperatures and lethal flooding across Europe. This case is about protecting ourselves against the worsening climate crisis and putting an end to oil and gas industry profiteering.

Feature image via Youtube – Sky News/ Evening Standard/ the Canary