A lot has happened since 1 June 2022, the date when ministers first granted permission to tap the Jackdaw gas field. The Conservatives were halfway through their ill-fated final term of three. Kwasi Kwarteng was the business secretary, with equally ill-fated aspirations for higher office. And the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – now responsible for overseeing all major energy policy decisions – did not even exist.
In the more than-four years since then, Britain has been treated to five new energy secretaries and six Chancellors. And the ownership of both Jackdaw and Rosebank – its northerly oil-based peer – has evolved thanks to the formation of Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Norway’s Equinor.
But in all that time – and through all those developments – Jackdaw, which brims with 40m barrels of oil equivalent off Aberdeen’s coastline, has been stuck in a kind of regulatory purgatory. One that has left Adura unable to turn on the taps and plunged hundreds of North Sea workers’ futures into jeopardy. That was at least until Wednesday morning, when Miatta Fahnbulleh, the latest of those six energy secretaries, rubber stamped the project, citing its impact on jobs, energy security and even the environment.
As expected, the long-awaited, heavily trailed decision has earned praise from some and opprobrium from others. Predictably, Donald Trump hailed it as “great news“, and urged the UK to “go FULL BLAST” on North Sea drilling. Climate campaigners, equally predictably, accused the government of clicking “‘mute’ on the sirens of climate damage”. But before getting into the move’s merits and pitfalls, not to mention what it suggests about Andy Burnham’s energy policy, it is worth reflecting on the tortuous four-year process it took to get here.
Shortly after Kwarteng sanctioned the projects, campaigners launched a legal effort to block both sites, claiming ministers had failed to take into account emissions generated from the burning of gas and oil extracted.. After a three-year battle, the Scottish court quashed the original consent, handing the activists a major victory and forcing its operators to resubmit their environmental assessments.
Resubmit, they did. And after a lengthy consultation process spearheaded by the North Sea regulator, it was left to the energy secretary to decide.
Why was Jackdaw approved?
Despite the environmental zealotry of her predecessor, now-foreign secretary Ed Miliband, Fahnbulleh’s approval is not surprising. Before he had even won a seat in parliament, her boss was promising to take a more “pragmatic approach” to Britain’s North Sea energy assets. Since then, be it at last month’s Labour party conference or during several media appearances, “pragmatism” has been the line that he and Fahnbulleh have repeated ad nauseam since.
It is a notably – and deliberately – vague commitment. But whatever one’s interpretation, it was always likely to spell good news for Jackdaw. Gas – and Jackdaw consists entirely of natural gas – will be part of the UK’s energy mix for decades no matter how successful our energy transition. If we have to rely on gas, simple logic dictates, why not reap the economic and environmental benefits of doing so domestically rather than shipping it from abroad?
As Fahnbulleh told the BBC yesterday morning, the choice, in her mind, was whether to permit “home-grown gas that I can set conditions on the emissions” and save hundreds of jobs or import “gas or oil from abroad where I can’t do that”.
Taken in isolation, those remarks suggest the government’s “pragmatism” could extend to an approval for Rosebank, the larger, more controversial oil field wrapped up in the same thorny process. Adura boss Neil McCulloch certainly seemed to think so, suggesting on Wednesday his firm anticipated a “positive” decision there, too.
But if subsequent briefings are to be believed, then McCulloch will find himself disappointed. Fahnbulleh is said to be “minded to reject” the oil field, situated to the west of the Shetland Islands, on a combination of energy security and climate grounds. Not only is oil a “dirtier” fuel than gas, it is also sold on an international market, meaning any approval would not meaningfully bolster our own energy supplies.
But to reject it would be to ignore the fact that the economic case for Rosebank is considerably stronger than that of Jackdaw. The former is larger and more complex – thus creating more high-skilled jobs and soliciting more investment. It will also generate substantially greater tax revenue for our cash-strapped Exchequer.
And that’s not even to get into whether Burnham’s rhetorical shift might stretch to ending the moratorium on new drilling projects. Many in the industry had hoped that the Prime Minister’s focus on reindustrialisation, combined with his constant vow to be “pragmatic”, might herald a softening of that stance too. But those hopes have been dashed by Fahnbulleh’s plan to put that commitment into law, making it considerably harder to unwind even for an opposition party.
There was a growing sense in the sector among energy execs Jackdaw might be the first of many dominoes to fall in their battle to reopen the North Sea. Barring a sudden change of heart in Whitehall, though, both the executives’ and the US President’s dreams of seeing the North Sea drilled at “FULL BLAST” will stay as fantastical as his UK counterpart’s hopes of creating growth in every postcode.