Government decision is about how much oil and gas is sensible for UK to produce on the way to net zero
A ndy Burnham hit the nail on the (well)head in his first fortnight as prime minister when he said : “The question isn’t whether Britain will still be using oil and gas, the question is, where does it come from?”
It was a nod towards several awkward energy facts. First, oil and gas provided 75% of the UK’s energy in 2025, government data shows. Second, even with the rollout of domestic renewables for generating electricity, about 43% of overall energy was imported last year.
Third, all credible paths to net zero emissions by 2050 involve using a lot of oil and gas on the way because we’re still in the foothills of electrification. Fewer than 2% of UK households have heat pumps, according to the lobby group Electrify Britain.
While sales of EVs are accelerating, nearly 95% of vehicles on the road run on petrol and diesel. Meanwhile, hydrogen and biomethane have barely taken off as alternatives to gas for those industrial processes that require higher temperatures than electricity can achieve – tricky for a government pursuing “reindustrialisation ”.
Fourth – and this one must alarm Downing Street – the global energy market has simply become less reliable. The strait of Hormuz can close overnight. The US president can threaten to ban diesel exports . Russian ships prowl the North Sea . Even the nice Norwegians, with an eye on their own energy consumers, scrapped a planned electricity cable to Scotland in 2023.
It is no longer a world of always-available “just in time” supply. Thinking has shifted to “just in case” scenario-planning. And a truly scary scenario would be disruption to the 725-mile Langeled pipeline that is the primary route for gas supplies from Norway, 40% of the UK’s consumption last year. The pipeline is a security vulnerability if ever there was one (if you doubt it, watch Sky News’ recent report ).
Now we have the start of an answer to Burnham’s “where should it come from?” question. The Jackdaw gasfield, 150 miles east of Aberdeen, has finally been approved to produce in time for winter. About time, too.
All the arguments from pragmatism were in the field’s favour. As this column has said in the past , less North Sea gas would inevitably mean more imported liquefied natural gas, with the extra carbon emissions created by chilling the fuel to -160C for shipment and then “regasifying” it at the other end.
Such cargos were 20% of UK gas imports last year, mostly from the US. It already feels absurd that the 24m UK households with a gas boiler burn any gas at all from the shale fields of Texas and Pennsylvania. Why increase the exposure if lower-polluting supplies are available off Aberdeen?
More UK North Sea gas production won’t lower the price for consumers much, if at all. But that was never the argument. It was always about tax receipts, jobs, the national balance of payments, relative emissions and the security that comes with having domestic volumes piped straight into the national gas network.
Jackdaw is not a gamechanger – it will be 6% of UK North Sea gas production at peak – but it’s definitely worth having while the UK is still using gas, which will be at least as long as the field’s 11-year life. The next question is whether other “tie-back” gasfields in already-explored areas, such as Tornado, west of the Shetlands, will follow. The line in the government’s announcement about “asking the regulator to consider urgent cases that could benefit from similar measures now” suggests so.
Rosebank, also near the Shetlands, is a trickier political proposition because it’s mostly oil, which is more polluting, and will be producing for longer. But the arguments aren’t wholly different. The common elements are still jobs, investment, taxes and the government’s ability to impose higher environmental standards during the production stage.
Meanwhile, the “it’s all exported” objection to Rosebank misses the fact that the UK oil industry operates within a European network. If the UK had more than four refineries (compared with nine at the turn of the century), a chunk of Rosebank’s output might be processed at home. As it is, some – perhaps the majority – will come back to the UK as petrol, diesel and jet fuel once it’s been refined in Rotterdam or elsewhere in north-west Europe.
Take a step back and the North Sea debate is really about how much oil and gas it is sensible for the UK to produce itself on the way to net zero. On the current trajectory, only about a third of consumption will come from domestic sources on a net basis. Even offshore lobbyists reckon a boost to North Sea production would only get the ratio up to about a half, albeit the figure would obviously increase if consumption of fossil fuels can be made to fall faster. Nobody is talking about the UK becoming a net exporter again.
Commitment to net zero by 2050 was intact, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, insisted. We wait to see what the new “energy wealth fund”, which will reinvest oil and gas revenues into renewable and low-carbon projects, means in practice. But the financial logic is sound: recycle the receipts from the old system to quicken the transition. Electrification, enabling consumers to make use of lower-carbon energy, is still the main story.
The bizarreness in the government’s previous approach was that, even as it proclaimed the virtues of “clean homegrown energy” such as wind, solar and nuclear, it pursued an approach that maximised imports when it came to oil and gas. Many, including the general secretary of the GMB union, Gary Smith, pointed out the flaw: it was hard for the UK to claim real climate leadership if it was simply off-shoring emissions.
In a small way, Jackdaw addresses the UK’s extreme reliance on imports. It is a step towards a joined-up commonsense approach to energy security. The real transition test remains the pace at which the UK stops using fossil fuels.