Rishi Sunak defends granting new North Sea oil and gas licences

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defended the decision to grant 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences.

The UK government has also said it will support a carbon capture project in the north east of Scotland.

Campaigners said that extracting more fossil fuels from the North Sea would “send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments”.

But Mr Sunak said granting the new licences was “entirely consistent” with net zero commitments.

It comes as the party faces internal divisions over its green policies – such as the review over low-traffic neighbourhoods in England – with some MPs calling for a rethink.

Mr Sunak confirmed support for the Acorn Project in St Fergus, Aberdeenshire, on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme, then later visited the site.

It is one of four carbon capture projects which will share up to £20bn of funding.

Mr Sunak said the announcement would support thousands of jobs across the UK.

He said granting the new oil and gas licences was “the right thing to do”.

He said: “Even when we reach net zero in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas and domestic gas production has about a quarter or a third of the carbon footprint of imported gas.”

The prime minister also said it made “absolutely no sense” to import energy supplies with “two to three times the carbon footprint of what we have got at home”.

He said increasing home-grown sources of energy would improve the UK’s resilience, create jobs and generate tax revenue to fund public services.

Mr Sunak said the government was determined to transition to net zero in a “proportionate and pragmatic” way.

And he also defended his plans to fly to Scotland as “an efficient use of time for the person running the country” and highlighted investment in new technologies, such as sustainable aviation fuel.

The prime minister said: “If your approach to climate change is to say that no one should go on holiday, no one should go on a plane, I think you are completely and utterly wrong.”

The Acorn project in St Fergus in Aberdeenshire missed out, quite controversially, on track one of funding for this back in 2021.

Instead it went to two projects in the north of England.

That was highly controversial because there had been heavy hints placed that the Scottish project would form part of that.

It was one of the most advanced projects in the UK, if not the most advanced, and then suddenly it was dropped.

The accusation was that the Conservative government at Westminster was favouring Red Wall constituencies following its success at the last general election.

But it was always the case that this would be a sequencing of events.

Between the projects announced in 2021 and today 10 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide will be captured and stored by 2030, the UK government says.

That includes emissions from Mosmorran, from Grangemouth, from a new power station to be built at Peterhead and, potentially, from direct air capture.

It effectively sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and also stores it.

Labour’s Ed Miliband claimed the Conservatives’ energy policy had left Britain as “the worst hit country in Western Europe during the energy crisis”.

Mr Miliband, the shadow climate change secretary, said: “Rishi Sunak’s weak and confused policy will not take a penny off bills – as his own party chair has admitted – will do nothing for our energy security, and drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments, while continuing to leave us at the mercy of fossil fuel dictators like Putin.”

And Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf said the new oil and gas licences demonstrated the UK government was “not serious about tackling the climate emergency”.

He tweeted: “For the PM to announce unlimited extraction of oil & gas, in the week the UN has confirmed July is set to be the hottest month in human history, shows the PM is willing to recklessly gamble the future of our planet for cheap political gain.”

The St Fergus project is a joint venture between Shell UK and other companies.

It would become Scotland’s first carbon capture and storage facility, which would see harmful greenhouse gas emissions piped under the North Sea.

This would prevent the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by capturing it at the point where the fossil fuel is being burnt.

The UK government said its “decisive action” would provide highly-skilled jobs for young people in the region.

It added this package would “defend the public” against the disruption of global energy supplies by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

However, climate campaigners criticised the decision to award new fossil fuel licences.

Oxfam climate change policy advisor Lyndsay Walsh said the announcement was another example of the government’s “hypocritical and dangerously inconsistent climate policy”.

She added: “Extracting more fossil fuels from the North Sea will send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments at a time when we should be investing in a just transition to a low carbon economy and our own abundant renewables.”

Mike Childs, head of policy at environmental charity Friends of the Earth, said the government needed to focus on energy efficiency and home-grown renewable resources rather than “championing more costly and dirty fossil fuels”.

He added: “Climate change is already battering the planet with unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves across the globe.”

And Fabrice Leveque, climate and energy policy manager at WWF Scotland, said politicians should be focusing on helping households to transition to clean heating rather than “chasing the mirage of cheap domestic fossil fuels”.

He added: “These new licences will do nothing to cut households’ energy bills and ignore the best way to boost our energy security – reducing demand for fossil fuels in the first place by insulating homes and replacing oil and gas boilers and vehicles with clean alternatives that run on cheap, homegrown renewables.”

Burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to generate electricity emits carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the main driver of climate change.

The carbon capture process stops most of the CO2 produced from being released, and either re-uses it or stores it underground.

Carbon capture technology is seen by policy makers as a vital tool in reaching the net zero target by the middle of the century.

Some environmentalists, however, are against it because they consider it a distraction from the urgent need to cut emissions.

The Acorn Project has been under development in various forms for more than a decade.

It had hoped to be one of the first projects of its kind to receive government backing in 2021, but lost out to two projects in the north of England around the Humber and the Mersey.

SNP Westminster leader and MP for Aberdeen South, Stephen Flynn, said “broken promises” had left Scotland’s green energy future in jeopardy.

Welcoming the investment, he added: “There can be no more broken promises or delays. Now is the time to strike on Scotland’s green energy potential.”

There have been questions raised about the government’s ability to meet its 2050 net zero target, with its climate advisers having warned the UK risks falling behind without much faster action.

On Friday, Mr Sunak said he was committed to meeting the target in a “pragmatic and proportionate way” but without “unnecessarily adding costs and burdens to families”.

Net zero means no longer adding to the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Mr Sunak has faced calls from some Tories to change the deadline for the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesels cars, but told the Sunday Telegraph he was not planning to do so.

There has also been debate over the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), which was widely seen as helping Conservatives seal a narrow victory in the Uxbridge by-election.

Both Mr Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have urged London mayor Sadiq Khan to reflect on the rollout as people struggle with cost-of-living pressures.