Jackdaw solution: is new North Sea gas the answer to UK’s energy woes?

The government has put energy security at the heart of today’s decision to approve drilling at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Climate campaigners have immediately condemned the decision, and Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called it an act of “climate vandalism” that “is a betrayal of all our futures”.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said it is “right” to look at “maximising the existing energy reserves we have in Britain” , while remaining committed to achieving net zero by 2050. Jackdaw “will start to supply gas to British homes and businesses from as early as the end of this month”, Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh told the BBC. But, although it will mean we use less imported energy, it “won’t lower our energy bills this winter”.

What did the commentators say?

“Militant opposition to further drilling in the North Sea is a futile hill to die on at the best of times,” said The Telegraph’s world economy editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. It’s pathologically stupid to do so “in the middle of a global energy crisis”. When successive British governments “wrote off” North Sea gas as a “short-term cash cow with no future”, the world’s shipping lanes were all open, “the US was still behaving like a friend and global supply seemed assured”. Circumstances are different now.

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That may be true but the “general assessment” from green campaigners is there is only a small amount of fossil fuel left to be “sucked from a largely-depleted North Sea basin”, said Politico London Playbook. Greenpeace, and the other NGOs that originally challenged drilling at Jackdaw, estimate that the gas field “will provide just 2% of the UK’s gas over its lifespan, doing ‘next to nothing’ to reduce reliance on foreign gas imports”, said Hettie O’Brien at The Guardian.

“The most persuasive arguments for Jackdaw are that it will boost UK tax revenues, stem the loss of jobs from North Sea oil” and have “no meaningful impact on UK emissions”. But “ultimately, approving more gas production at Jackdaw means the global supply of fossil fuels will increase”.

Is Andy Burnham “living in a parallel universe? One where we haven’t just endured our hottest summer on record, with droughts, wildfires and, in all likelihood, the most heat-related deaths on record?” said Danny Gross, of Friends of the Earth, in a statement. “Jackdaw won’t make a jot of difference to energy bills but it will fuel the climate chaos already unfurling in front of us.”

What next?

“Broadly speaking”, Jackdaw has cross-party support, and the majority of Labour MPs are “comfortable with endorsing” it, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. But the same can’t be said for drilling at Rosebank, a new oilfield 80 miles off the Shetland coast, which is still awaiting government approval.

Jackdaw “was always going to be an easier sell than the far larger Rosebank, which would produce seven times the carbon emissions” if it were to be approved, said O’Brien at The Guardian. Some environmental campaigners “regard the sole approval of Jackdaw as an acceptable compromise”.