The UK government will soon face a momentous decision over whether to approve production in the Rosebank oilfield off the coast of Shetland.
Rosebank is the UK’s biggest undeveloped field. Its proponents – the largest of which is Norwegian state-owned petroleum company, Equinor – estimate that it will produce the equivalent of up to 500 million barrels of oil between 2026 and 2051. When burned, this oil will generate up to 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than the combined annual emissions of 28 low-income countries.
Thanks to recent court cases, the climate effects of those “combustion emissions” will need to be taken into account by the government when it decides whether to approve production at Rosebank. In a new report, two colleagues and I reviewed the evidence concerning the implications of new oil and gas fields in the UK.
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There is a rapidly dwindling global carbon budget for holding temperature increases to below 1.5°C of warming (the more conservative end of the Paris agreement’s temperature goal).
Globally, the emissions from burning the fossil fuels in oil and gas fields and coalmines that are already operating or under development far exceed that budget. In this context, Rosebank’s combustion emissions are highly significant, as they add considerably to that excess.
We also found that the projected production from existing fields is sufficient to meet or exceed global oil and gas demand in modelled economic scenarios in which climate warming is restrained to within 1.5°C. This is further evidence that new fields are not consistent with achieving globally agreed temperature goals.
However, it is often asserted by supporters of new fields that keeping UK oil in the ground won’t reduce global emissions, because another producer will supply the demand and reap the benefits. This is a gross and dangerous oversimplification which, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, “defies basic economics of supply and demand”.
Allowing a new field like Rosebank would increase the supply of oil globally, resulting in a fall in its price which, though small, would cause more oil to be consumed. As UK government advisers at the Climate Change Committee have acknowledged, new petroleum projects “support a larger global market overall” for petroleum. Stopping Rosebank would have the opposite effect, and lead to less oil consumed.
The oil industry likes to trumpet the UK’s relatively low upstream emissions – that is, from the process of extracting oil – compared with those of competitors overseas. But this is a distraction from the bigger issue: the additional greenhouse gases emitted from consuming the extra oil that new fields produce.
A recent peer-reviewed study by economists and experts in the emissions-intensity of oil and gas production concluded that limiting oil supply will almost always lead to lower overall emissions, regardless of the intensity of upstream emissions from different fields. It is highly likely that leaving Rosebank’s oil in the ground will result in lower global greenhouse gases than would occur if the field were developed.
However, this focus on Rosebank’s aggregate emissions ignores two further reasons the field’s development consent should be refused on climate grounds.
A litmus test of climate leadership
First, exploiting new sources of oil supply like Rosebank locks in future oil and gas production, ultimately making it economically, politically and legally harder to wind the industry down.
Second, as the Climate Change Committee also stated, decisions by the UK government concerning petroleum production have an important “signalling effect” internationally and at home.
Internationally, the UK government has rightly acknowledged that climate action “must be accelerated drastically” to keep the average global temperature rise “below 1.5°C”.
The UK has a proud reputation for climate leadership. It was the first country to enact a legally binding framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it rapidly phased out coal-fired power generation, and in 2019 it became the first country to adopt a net zero emissions target.
Building on this legacy, the foreign secretary David Lammy has vowed to “push for the ambition needed to keep 1.5 degrees alive”. But approving Rosebank would signal to the world that the UK government is not sincere about keeping the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C goal “alive”, after all.
Some might think that aspirations to climate leadership are futile given the Trump administration’s “drill, baby, drill” approach to fossil fuels. But Trump’s recklessness at a critical time for global climate efforts makes UK climate leadership more important than ever.
The UK already chairs a suite of international energy transition alliances focused on the international phase-out of coal-fired power, the scale-up of renewables, and the financing of these transitions. It could plug a gap in its influence by rejecting Rosebank and joining the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance, a “club” of (currently) 25 national and sub-national governments that are working to phase-out oil and gas production and persuade other countries to follow suit.
And it could deepen cooperation with the EU to drive down oil and gas demand and scale up clean energy throughout the region, yielding benefits that will outlive the Trump administration.
Domestically, rejecting Rosebank would send a powerful signal to investors about the sincerity of the government’s commitment to achieve economic growth by becoming a “clean energy superpower”, as the governing Labour party pledged to do at the last election.
But the benefits of clean prosperity must extend to the people and communities caught up in the transition, too. The UK’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, along with the jobs their production supports, are in terminal decline.
Oil and gas workers and the communities in which they are based already face a volatile future. New fields like Rosebank would create some additional jobs in this declining industry. But they cannot arrest its long-term decline.
The government recognises that this transition is already taking place and will continue. With targeted regional and industrial investment, support for workers and their families, and careful planning that meaningfully involves affected communities, the UK has an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how to achieve a just transition away from oil and gas.
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Fergus Green has received consulting fees from and provided expert evidence on behalf of an environmental nongovernmental organisation engaged in climate-related litigation against a fossil fuel company. He informally consults with a number of environmental nongovernmental organisations in relation to fossil fuel production issues in the UK and elsewhere. He is a member of the Just Transition Expert Group of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (the role is unremunerated).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
