With energy prices volatile due to the conflict in the Middle East, many are calling for North Sea oil resources to be fully exploited

How much oil and gas do we use? 
The UK has rapidly decarbonised its energy sector, with emissions falling by about 54% since 1990. Fossil fuels supply only around a third of our electricity, but when it comes to the total energy mix – including heating, transport etc – we still rely heavily on oil and gas: they accounted for 74% of the total in 2024 (36.5% oil; 37.5% gas). And the nation is producing less of both than it once did. In 1999, when production peaked on the UK Continental Shelf, Britain was a net exporter of oil, and was self-sufficient in gas. Today, only about 50% of UK oil comes from domestic sources; some 30% of the UK’s natural gas also comes from domestic sources. Whereas, of the imports: 76% of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) comes from Norway; 17% from the US and about 2% from the Persian Gulf. 

Is there much oil and gas left? 
The UK Continental Shelf (largely in the North Sea, but also in the Irish Sea) is a mature basin: over the past 60 years, its most accessible oil and gas – about 47.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) – has been extracted. Domestic production of oil and gas fell by 76% and 73% respectively between 2000 and 2024. Today there are over 280 active oil and gas fields, but 180 of these are expected to cease production by 2030. Estimates vary as to how much is left. According to the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, there’s an estimated 2.3 billion BOE of recoverable oil and gas in the North Sea – enough to cover a sixth of the UK’s projected needs until its net-zero target date of 2050. Offshore Energies UK, an industry group, estimates there are around 7.5 billion BOE of oil. The North Sea Transition Authority, the industry regulator, is more cautious: it thinks the North Sea is home to 2.9 billion BOE of “proven and probable reserves” of oil and gas, with an extra 10.8 billion that may or may not be accessible. 

How easily could it be recovered? 
“Easy oil is over,” says Dr Mark Ireland, a geologist at Newcastle University. “What remains are smaller, sometimes more remote, and often more technically challenging or expensive resources and reserves.” New exploration competes for investment with more accessible sources of hydrocarbons abroad, so the North Sea’s future depends on relatively high oil and gas prices, tax levels that aren’t too high and investor confidence. At present, a headline 78% tax rate and high costs mean British oil fields need global prices at nearly $40 a barrel just to break even, more than twice the threshold for Norway. There are undeveloped fields, where oil or gas are confirmed but not yet produced. Furthest along is Jackdaw gas field, which could be connected to the UK within months; but that and Rosebank have not been approved. 

Could more drilling lower prices? 
Probably not. Oil and gas prices are set on international markets; and given the North Sea’s relatively small reserves, drilling there would not impact global prices. Nigel Topping, chair of the Climate Change Committee, says the best way to bring down bills is by “making clean electricity cheaper and reducing demand for oil and gas – not doubling down on declining resources”. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero wants to get Britain off “the roller-coaster of fossil fuel prices and onto homegrown power that we control”. 

But might it be useful in other ways? 
Yes. Advocates of further exploration point out that it would improve energy security: gas is pumped straight into the UK’s energy system, which insulates the nation from energy shocks, and potentially from price spikes such as the present one. Crucially, they point out, companies licensed to extract North Sea oil and gas would pay billions in tax – money that could be used, for instance, to lower domestic energy bills. (The industry has paid between £4.5 billion and £9 billion in annual tax in recent years.) Domestic production is good for the balance of payments, too: the UK spent £36 billion on oil and gas imports in 2024, money lost to the British economy. And jobs are at stake. In the past decade, the North Sea workforce has shrunk from 450,000 to 160,000; the hope that jobs would be created in renewable energy to replace them has not yet been borne out. 

Wouldn’t more drilling undermine our climate policies? 
On the face of it, yes. Over the Jackdaw field’s lifetime, if you include both “operational” and “downstream” emissions (those caused by burning the gas), it will generate the equivalent of 35.8 million tonnes of carbon – nearly Scotland’s total emissions per year. On the other hand, realistically, Britain is going to need a lot of oil and gas even if it does reach net zero by 2050, for domestic heating, transport – and to back up intermittent wind and solar. Shell, which owns Jackdaw, argues that “the UK will consume this gas, wherever it is produced” – and imported LNG from the US and Qatar is about a fifth more carbon intensive. Thus, arguably, domestic production can help reduce overall emissions. 

So what should we do? 
Opinion is divided. Reform UK, the Conservatives and most recently the SNP have all backed further drilling in the North Sea. Even Tara Singh, CEO of RenewableUK, the trade association for renewable power, has argued that the UK should continue, and even increase, North Sea gas production for energy security during the transition to net zero, to reduce imports. But Labour’s 2024 election manifesto explicitly ruled out issuing new oil and gas exploration licences, although it does allow “tiebacks” for existing fields. (The Lib Dems and the Greens are also opposed.) The Energy Secretary Ed Miliband argues that Britain should show “climate leadership”, and that if it were to allow more licences and more drilling, it would undermine efforts to slow global warming and to move to low-carbon energy sources.

Jackdaw and Rosebank 
In 2004, the energy giant Chevron discovered a huge new oil and gas field about 80 miles northwest of the Shetland Islands. Rosebank, as it was named, is the biggest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, and is estimated to contain between 300 and 500 million barrels of oil equivalent. Another big discovery, the Jackdaw gas field, was made a year later – this time by Shell affiliate BG International, about 150 miles off the coast of Aberdeen.

Since then, however, efforts to develop both fields have stalled. Jackdaw was eventually given the go-ahead in 2022; and Rosebank a year later. But both decisions were challenged in court by environmental groups. Last year, the Court of Session in Edinburgh found that the government had erred by not taking into account “downstream” emissions caused by burning the fossil fuels extracted; they now need fresh authorisation from Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. Experts say Jackdaw, which could supply 2% of UK gas demand, could come on stream this winter if given the green light. It has been reported that Miliband is minded to approve Jackdaw but not Rosebank. Another large prospective oil and gas field, Cambo, lies 20 miles southwest of Rosebank. Exploration has stalled over environmental objections.

In May 2025, Ye – formerly Kanye West – released a single called “Heil Hitler”, which contained a lengthy sample from one of Hitler’s speeches, said Dan Hancox in The Guardian. Around the same time, he started selling swastika T-shirts on his website. As a result, the musician, who has frequently been accused of racism, homophobia and sexism, was sued by his own talent agency, and denied entry to Australia. So news that he had been booked to headline the three-day Wireless Festival in north London was, shall we say, “a little surprising”. It brought condemnation from Jewish groups; sponsors withdrew; and a week later the Home Office barred Ye from entry into the UK, prompting the cancellation of the entire festival. Industry insiders were shocked by this sudden unravelling of a major event, said Eamonn Forde and Sarah Walker in the same paper – but were also puzzled as to why its organiser, Festival Republic, had risked booking Ye in the first place. 

Well, festivals are big business these days, said Zing Tsjeng in The i Paper – and notoriety sells. Festival Republic must have looked at Ye’s still healthy streaming figures, and his ability to court outrage, and seen dollar signs. Their own defence, however, was that Ye’s antisemitic actions could be overlooked because they were attributable to his bipolar disorder, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. In January, the rapper had taken out an ad in The Wall Street Journal, in which he explained that he had been in the grip of a long manic episode, and insisted that he loved Jewish people. He sounded sincere, but he placed the ad shortly before announcing a world tour; and it made no mention of his long history of spewing antisemitic hatred. In 2022, he publicly praised Hitler, and tweeted that he’d be going “death con 3” on Jews. He apologised then too – yet neither he nor his staff seem to have taken steps to prevent a public recurrence. He didn’t record and release Heil Hitler alone. He wasn’t printing his swastika merchandise in his shed. A manager with power of attorney could have stopped it. 

I don’t really buy the mental health defence, said Ella Whelan in The Daily Telegraph. If Ye doesn’t hate Jews, he uses Jew hatred to get attention. But I still think the government was wrong to ban him. That only lends him the glamour of the censored. Many Britons will have applauded the decision that Ye’s presence would not be “conducive to the public good”, said Sarah McLaughlin on UnHerd; but do we really want ministers to filter visitors to the UK on the basis of their opinions? Banning them won’t make their offensive ideas go away; and it’s a power to limit free speech that could easily be misused.

In the summer of 1994, Lisa Kudrow joined five other struggling actors on a private plane to Las Vegas. Once there, the director James Burrows, a sitcom veteran, sat them down and told them something important, says Adam White in The Independent. Never again, he said, would they be able to socialise in public together without being noticed. Because once their new show, “Friends”, hit the airwaves? Forget it. 

“I remember everyone going, ‘oooooh’,” laughs Kudrow. “Everyone but me, anyway. I was the odd one out. I thought maybe...? I mean, it’s a good show, but I don’t know about that.” Burrows, of course, was right; and that trip wasn’t the only time Kudrow felt like the odd one out. 

Unlike the others, she’d studied for an academic degree, biology; she wanted to be an expert on cluster headaches. Her character, the kooky Phoebe Buffay, was the outsider in the “Friends” inner circle; and even when the show became a mega-hit, Kudrow didn’t get a great professional boost. “Nobody cared about me,” she chuckles. She’s sanguine about this, but it was strange: her own talent agency referred to her as “the sixth Friend”. “There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have,” she recalls. “There was just, like, ‘Boy, is she lucky she got on that show.’”