Myth busting oil and gas emissions cuts

As part of its ongoing persuasion campaign to be allowed to continue drilling in the UK, the oil and gas industry regularly points to efforts it is making to cut emissions from North Sea production. 

The latest announcement from the industry is that it is ahead of schedule when it comes to meeting its targets to reduce emissions. Here’s why we should be wary of these claims. 

The industry is taking credit for meeting targets that are so weak as to be almost impossible to miss. Take the 2025 target of reducing emissions by 10%: the industry’s emissions were already below the threshold required to meet this target when it was set (by the industry) in the 2021 North Sea Transition Deal. 

The 2027 target is for a 25% reduction in emissions (since 2018), which the industry now says it has met ahead of schedule. This, it says, is because of the ‘huge efforts made by the UK oil & gas industry’. In fact, half of the emissions reductions that the industry is claiming to have made in the past five years have come from the decline in production in the North Sea. In other words, from old fields shutting down. 

Efforts the industry has made to cut emissions include reducing flaring, which is when unused gas is burned off. Given that neighbouring Norway, with whom the UK shares the North Sea, banned flaring decades ago, the industry could and should have done this years ago.

Longer term, the industry is not on track to meet its emissions reduction targets in 2030, 2040, and 2050. These aren’t arbitrary thresholds – they are supposed to be guardrails to ensure the UK sticks to its climate plans.

UK oil and gas is also becoming more polluting, and the amount of CO₂ emissions per barrel of oil is expected to continue to increase as it gets harder to get oil and gas out of the ageing North Sea and the industry’s capacity – and willingness – to decarbonise production fails to keep up.

These announcements on emissions are used by the industry to support its campaign to be allowed to continue opening up new oil and gas reserves in the UK. The industry’s argument being that it is better for the environment to produce gas domestically, rather than rely on more polluting gas imports – and look, they’re making it even cleaner! 

What they don’t say, however, is that nearly three quarters (71%) of the UK’s gas imports last year came from Norway via pipeline, which is half as polluting as UK produced gas. 

But all of this is a distraction. The industry is only talking about cuts to production emissions, the relatively small emissions created by getting the oil and gas out of the North Sea. These are dwarfed by the emissions created when all this oil and gas is burned.

And it is fiddling with these relatively tiny production emissions while pursuing huge new oil and gas projects in the North Sea that it knows will push us past safe climate limits.

Take the huge new Rosebank oil field off the Shetland coast, which oil companies Equinor and Ithaca want to develop. Burning Rosebank’s reserves would create more than 200 million tonnes of CO2 –  that would be more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 low-income countries in the world, including Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

We should not be distracted. The time for fiddling has passed. The climate crisis today demands that we end new drilling.

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