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Scientists comment on an open letter to the DESNZ Secretary of State urging strict conditions if Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas field licences are granted.
Prof Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, said:
“The letter is right that limiting warming to “well below 2°C” requires fossil-fuel use to decline rapidly in the near term. What it does not confront is what “rapidly” now means. With global temperatures already at or around the more stringent Paris 1.5°C threshold, the remaining carbon budget for “well below 2°C” – taken as an 83% chance of not exceeding 2°C – requires global CO₂ emissions to fall by around 8% year-on-year. Against reductions of this order, the UK’s 2050 net-zero target is not the climate test the letter takes it to be. The relevant test is the original UNFCCC obligation to prevent “dangerous” interference with the climate system, given quantitative expression through the Paris Agreement and reinforced by the ICJ’s recent climate opinion. The question, therefore, is not how to make continued fossil-fuel development compatible with net zero by 2050, but how rapidly fossil-fuel emissions must now be cut, and ultimately eliminated altogether.
“The timeframe should not be fixed at 2050: every year emissions fail to fall at the necessary rate, the required transition becomes more rapid. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, annual global emissions have continued to rise and are now over 10% higher than they were in 2015, yet policymakers and many ‘experts’ remain stubbornly wedded to the 2050 end date.
“The proposed storage obligation in the letter risks giving the oil and gas industry precisely the get-out clause it has repeatedly sought: expand fossil-fuel production today and promise to capture the consequences tomorrow. After decades in which senior executives from across the industry have actively undermined and delayed serious climate action, giving them another route for postponing emissions reductions is profoundly dangerous.
“With North Sea rig decommissioning, around half of the costs are ultimately borne by the taxpayer, in part because companies receive substantial tax relief for meeting their environmental obligations. Moreover, decommissioning liabilities are often agreed decades before expenditure is incurred, with assumptions about future inflation that can further reduce the industry’s eventual contribution by hundreds of millions of pounds. It is therefore not clear how far an obligation of the kind proposed in the letter would actually reduce public expenditure compared with state-funded CCS. While the idea may appear superficially attractive, it underestimates the industry’s longstanding ability to negotiate, defer and externalise the costs of environmental regulation.
“Added to this, CCS is nowhere near the scale implied by the letter. After almost three decades of promises that affordable CCS is just around the corner, today global CCS captures and, importantly, stores less than 0.1% of current fossil-fuel emissions. It is proving far more technically, energetically and economically challenging than its advocates have acknowledged. The assumptions around engineered carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are even more extraordinary. Yet CDR is increasingly embedded in climate scenarios as though it were an established technology, when, beyond laboratories and small pilot projects, large-scale engineered removal simply does not yet exist. Even if these technologies do prove scalable, relying on them to deliver at the necessary scale within the very tight remaining carbon budget for “well below 2°C” effectively amounts to an overshoot-and-return strategy: assuming temperatures can be allowed to rise while we cross our fingers that removals arrive at scale before climate tipping elements are triggered.
“There is also a basic opportunity cost: every pound invested in extending fossil-fuel supply is a pound that cannot be invested in genuinely zero-carbon alternatives, whether reducing demand or developing clean energy. We should be accelerating that transition, not constructing mechanisms to prolong fossil-fuel dependence.
“Finally, the letter’s reference to “difficult-to-abate” emissions needs much closer scrutiny. A significant part of the residual fossil-fuel demand envisaged in such scenarios is aviation, a highly unequal form of consumption disproportionately undertaken by wealthier citizens. Using scarce carbon budgets and speculative technologies to preserve high levels of aviation therefore risks privileging the consumption of the wealthy while shifting the costs and risks onto everyone else. CCS may well have an important role in genuinely impossible-to-abate industrial process emissions, such as those from cement. But that cannot become a back door for maintaining high-carbon fossil fuel norms for a select few.
“The key question for journalists is therefore: why are we discussing mechanisms to make new oil and gas development compatible with a 2050 net-zero target, rather than asking how rapidly existing wells and fields need to be phased out to meet the much more fundamental obligation to prevent dangerous climate change?”
Dr Michelle Cain, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Data Analytics at Cranfield University, said:
“This group of experts identify a straightforward requirement for bringing fossil fuel burning into line with global climate objectives, and indeed the UK government’s own legally binding targets. To reconcile future fossil fuel usage with stopping further global warming, any fossil fuel burning will have to be accompanied by capture or removal from the atmosphere, and permanent storage of that carbon dioxide. This would be ’net-zero’ as any added carbon dioxide would be cancelled out by permanently removing the same amount from the atmosphere. Requiring any new licensees to do this is an elegant solution to the problem.”
Prof Jon Gluyas, Emeritus Chair in Geoenergy Carbon Capture & Storage, Durham University, said:
“If the UK government goes ahead and sanctions development of the Jackdaw and/or Rosebank petroleum fields, it also has a rare opportunity to strengthen its commitment to deliver net zero carbon emissions. The opportunity, which is counterintuitive, is that either project could be hardwired to deliver net carbon neutrality or better – in other words it would be carbon-negative as part of the licensing process.
“Carbon negative hardwiring of these projects would provide a template for any future energy projects which include fossil fuel elements. Collectively, energy security, energy sustainability and energy equity could all be improved by taking this proactive approach to petroleum resource development in the UK and beyond.”
Prof Sam Fankhauser, Professor of Climate Economics and Policy at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, said:
“Climate change will get worse unless the residual carbon we continue to emit is captured and put back underground. Requiring the developers of new oil and gas fields to take on this responsibility is fair, effective and can build on existing local skills.”
Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, Director of the Centre for Climate Repair and Director of Research for Cambridge Zero, University of Cambridge, said:
“This suggestion is important, and the principle at stake is in line with other laws which we already have. For example, you cannot dump untreated sewage from your home or business onto land or into rivers, lakes, or the sea. If you create the waste, you need to deal with it properly.
“Perhaps of even greater relevance is the principle that if an industry has a value-generating process but it generates waste then there are often rules as to how the companies involved in a process deal with it. For example, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive is a European Union law designed to reduce electronic waste and promote recycling. Makers and sellers of electrical goods must pay for collecting, treating, and recycling their products. The oil industry should be subject to similar ideals.”
Declared interests
Kevin Anderson: “I have no relevant interests to declare.”
Michelle Cain: “I do not have any interests to declare.”
Jon Gluyas: “I am a signatory of the letter. I have provided support to the DESNZ CCS track 1 and track 2 projects since 2020.”
Shaun Fitzgerald: “I am a signatory of the letter.”
Sam Fankhouser: “I am a signatory of the letter.”
For all other experts, no reply to our request for DOIs was received.
This Roundup was accompanied by an SMC Briefing.