UK faces unique opportunity to prevent 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from North Sea

The UK government is finally being forced to look at the massive harm that new North Sea oil and gas drilling is doing to our climate. While it consults on what this means, Uplift looks at the enormous opportunity the country now has to stop vast amounts of CO2 from being released into our atmosphere. 

Over fifty years of oil and gas drilling has helped make the UK a major global polluter. In that time, the UK Continental Shelf has produced nearly 50 billion barrels of oil and gas, the burning of which is equivalent to nearly 20 billion tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. 

Even with the North Sea in decline, the UK remains the second largest oil and gas producer in Europe today, and the UK government has made it clear that the nearly 300 existing fields in the North Sea will continue producing oil and gas for years to come. Together, when their fuels are burnt, these fields and their developers will be responsible for at least 1.3 billion tonnes more of CO2.

This vast amount of CO2 that has been produced –  and the climate harms it creates – has never been disclosed, put in the public domain or made available to the politicians and regulators responsible for approving new drilling. 

This is because oil and gas companies have never had to declare the enormous emissions that result from burning the oil and gas they produce. Even though we  – and they – know these are the main driver of climate change. Regulators have only ever had to account for the relatively minor emissions produced by getting oil and gas out of the ground.

‍Following a landmark Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, however, this is set to change. From now on, decision-makers will finally have to factor in the full emissions from new North Sea developments before approving new drilling. The government is currently consulting on how the regulatory process will need to change as a result. 

Uplift has looked at what this enormous change means for new oil and gas projects in the North Sea – and at the huge opportunity this country now has to prevent vast amounts of climate pollution from being released into our atmosphere. 

A quick technical note on the regulatory process: before consent is given to a new oil and gas project, companies must submit an environmental impact assessment that sets out the extent of the harm the development will have. Currently, the regulator must assess these emissions in a worst-case scenario – in other words what is the likely maximum harm a new oil and gas field will cause. For oil and gas fields, this means a ‘high-production’ scenario and assuming that the oil and gas will be combusted. We have used this as the basis for our calculations below.

How many barrels – and CO2 emissions – are we talking about? 

The UK has a pipeline of oil and gas projects that would be covered by this change to the regulatory process – and whose full climate harm may now have to be accounted for before decisions are made on whether or not to approve them.  

These include licenced but as yet undeveloped projects which include, for example, the controversial proposed Cambo oil field off the coast of Shetland. In total, this pipeline of new projects is estimated to hold nearly 4 billion barrels of oil equivalent (under a high-production scenario). 

If burned, this oil and gas would release 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2. For scale, that’s the same amount of CO2 that the UK’s 28 million households would produce over 30 years (at current rates of household emissions).

In addition to these new developments, some new projects in existing fields could also fall under the new rules (if the projects cross thresholds set within the regulations). These extension projects could produce a further 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent (under a high-production scenario). If burned, these barrels would create 850 million more tonnes of CO2. 

Finally, there are two recently sanctioned oil and gas fields – Rosebank and Jackdaw – that are currently under legal challenge that could also be covered by the new regulations. If the court rules that decision-makers should have taken into account the emissions from burning their oil and gas when deciding whether or not to approve them, then these could also be included. Burning Rosebank’s resources would produce 200 million tonnes of CO2, and Jackdaw’s gas reserves, an additional 32 million tonnes of CO2. 

Approving new oil and gas in a climate crisis

The evidence is now clear that new oil and gas drilling is incompatible with staying within safe climate limits. Existing and proposed fossil fuel projects around the world will produce enough emissions to break our global commitment to staying within 1.5C. Every new oil and gas project pushes us into more dangerous climate territory. 

Up until now, however, this global picture has never been factored into UK decisions on oil and gas. Instead, decision-makers have taken a narrow and partial view, only counting emissions from producing – never burning – the UK’s oil and gas reserves. 

This is now slowly starting to change. Even before it considered the implications of the Supreme Court ruling, the Labour government committed to – and was elected on – banning new licensing of oil and gas. 

This is a good start. Almost 4 billion additional barrels of oil equivalent are estimated to exist within known but as yet unlicensed North Sea resources (under a high-production scenario). If the ban is enacted –  and the government is due to consult on implementing it early next year – it could prevent up to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere. A further 3.5 billion barrels, give or take, are estimated to be in yet-to-be-found resources. While the high costs and effort required to find these barrels were always likely to be an insurmountable barrier to their production, these barrels, too, look set to stay in the ground.

But when the impacts of our changing climate are now so obvious, severe and worsening – and the costs to ordinary people mounting – it is incumbent on the UK government, as a major oil and gas producer, to go further. 

Already, UK households and businesses are struggling with the costs of cleaning up after floods, UK farmers are losing millions from waterlogged fields, and the government and councils are having to find the money for extra flood defences. 

The more oil and gas is produced, the more extreme our weather gets, the more costs fall on the rest of us. 

This government needs to call time on new drilling.

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Methodology

This analysis uses NSTA Reserves and Resources report (as of end 2023) estimates to establish the total amount of oil and gas within existing fields, new fields, and licensed but yet-to-be-developed areas. 2P reserves were used to estimate the total reserves held in existing fields (without further approval for expanded development). Following the ruling of the Supreme Court in Finch, the climate impacts of new fields will need to be assessed against a high-case production scenario. For this reason, 3C resources are used to estimate the total amounts of oil and gas that could be unlocked from further development within existing fields (contingent resources in producing fields) and new fields (contingent resources in proposed new developments). The amount of oil and gas in licensed but yet-to-be-developed acreage is assumed to be a third of 3C contingent resources in marginal discoveries, as estimated by the NSTA within the report. 

Under the current legislative regime, issuing an oil and gas licence is the first step towards the development of a new oil or gas project. A licence enables the company that holds it to identify oil and gas reserves that they would like to extract. However, before they are able to begin extraction they must apply for and be awarded a field development consent. Development consents require the Secretary of State and the regulator to be satisfied that the development meets key environmental, economic and safety criteria. It can be years between a licence for exploration and a new project being approved. The Rosebank oil field, for example, received its first licence in 2001 and its development consent only in late 2023.

As sanctioned projects, the oil and gas held in Phase 1 of Rosebank and Jackdaw are categorised by the NSTA as “Reserves”. They are, therefore, nested within our emissions calculations for existing field reserves. This means that our estimates for the emissions that need to be considered within the scope 3 consultation do not fully capture those associated with Rosebank and Jackdaw. 

The total amounts of oil and gas within each category were multiplied by emissions factors to estimate the emissions associated with burning the fuel. The factor for crude oil, was taken from the Finch judgement. The factor for natural gas is from DESNZ’s Greenhouse Gas conversion factors: 2024. As the NSTA does not provide a breakdown of the amounts of gas condensate expected to exist within the gas reserves, we have assumed that all gas reserves are dry gas. In practice, some gas will be in condensate form which has a higher emissions factor, meaning that our emissions associated with gas will be conservative. 

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