She pointed out that the development could be eligible for £3.57bn in tax breaks under the windfall tax, which hands companies incentives for investing in increased oil and gas production. Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said: “This analysis clearly shows what the government has long known but chosen to ignore: that it is impossible to reconcile approving a huge new oilfield like Rosebank with the UK meeting its climate obligations.” By this reckoning, North Sea oil and gas operations should account for only about 4% of the UK’s carbon budgets, which run for five years each and have so far been set out to 2037. The carbon budget is not formally divided up among emitting sectors, but the Committee on Climate Change provides guidelines suggesting that various sectors should stay within approximate limits. This would be enough, when added to the emissions from the operations of existing oil and gas fields, to exceed the amount of emissions that should be allowed to come from the UK’s oil and gas sector, within the UK’s total carbon budget, from 2028.Ĭounting Rosebank’s likely emissions, oil and gas production would exceed its theoretical share of the UK’s fifth carbon budget, from 2028 to 2032, by about 8%, and exceed its share of the sixth carbon budget, from 2033 to 2037, by about 17%. The emissions from Rosebank’s operations alone – not counting any emissions from burning the oil and gas it is likely to produce – are likely to reach 5.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to analysis by Uplift of the environmental statements provided by Equinor. The Rosebank field, to be developed by the Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor, is about three times the size of the Cambo field, which was the subject of intense campaigning before being paused last year. They contain a major gamble on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which will receive £20bn of government support over 20 years, and which ministers said would allow for continued fossil fuel use.īut scientists told the Observer that using CCS in this way was a dangerous gamble, and that calling off any proposed new development of oil and gas was a safer way to meet the net zero commitment. The government’s energy security and net zero strategies, running to more than 1,000 pages, were unveiled on Thursday. Ministers are in the midst of a new licensing round for oil and gas in the North Sea, and this is expected to continue despite the net zero strategy. The findings raise further questions over the government’s plans to push ahead with the development of oil and gas despite pleas from scientists and the UN to halt new licences. That would mean other sectors of the economy would have to cut their emissions further and faster to enable the UK to stay within its carbon budgets, if the Rosebank field went ahead. But analysis by the campaigning group Uplift has shown that the likely emissions just from producing oil from the field would be enough to exceed the share of the UK’s carbon budgets that should come from oil and gas production, from 2028 onwards.
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