Not exactly the 1990's 'Dash for Gas'* but still a recognition of political and geopolitical reality.
From The Guardian, October 20:
Jackdaw gasfield announcement signals UK’s commitment to North Sea industry but undermines green credentials
The Jackdaw gasfield will be given the go-ahead on Wednesday, signalling Andy Burnham’s commitment to the North Sea fossil fuel industry and threatening to trigger a row with climate campaigners and Labour MPs.
Miatta Fahnbulleh and John Healey, the energy secretary and chancellor respectively, will make the announcement from Aberdeen on Wednesday morning after more than a year of deliberations over whether doing so would violate the UK’s climate commitments.
The approval for drilling at one of the biggest undeveloped fields in the declining North Sea basin is a big boost for Britain’s oil and gas industry – and especially for Shell and the Norwegian company Equinor, which operate it.
It will be met with outrage from climate campaigners, who say it undermines Labour’s green credentials and will exacerbate the climate crisis.
Tessa Khan, the executive director of the anti-oil campaign group Uplift, said: “Jackdaw will provide around just 2% of our gas demand for roughly 10 years. It has been oversold and won’t stop the overall decline in North Sea jobs, as it will be largely unmanned and operated remotely.”
She added: “Labour’s climate credibility is on the line. No new oil and gasfields are compatible with safe climate limits.”
When fully operational, Jackdaw will account for 6% of North Sea gas production, making it one of the biggest gasfields not yet under production.
Along with the Rosebank oilfield, its status has become symbolic of the government’s commitment to the oil and gas industry, which is facing heavy job losses as reserves decline and platforms become increasingly automated.
The field was approved by the Conservative government in 2022, with ministers arguing it would help shield the UK from the volatility in the energy market caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Labour came to power in 2024 on a promise not to grant any new licences in the North Sea, not expecting to have to make a decision on Jackdaw or Rosebank.
However both fields were cast into doubt last year by a landmark ruling that said their environmental approval had been incorrectly granted.
A judge ruled that when deciding whether the two fields would violate the UK’s climate commitments, regulators should have taken into account the carbon emissions generated by burning the oil and gas they would produce.
Shell and Equinor resubmitted their application for environmental consent last September. Since then, Fahnbulleh and her predecessor, Ed Miliband, have spent months deciding whether to use their ministerial power to block it.
Both the prime minister and his predecessor, Keir Starmer, have come under heavy pressure to allow the fields to go ahead in recent months, not least from Donald Trump, who urged both men to “open up the North Sea”....
Environmental Capital has a post that I couldn't resist commenting on:Baseline Play: Cut Emissions Compared With When, Exactly?...Those emissions targets for the rich world take 1990 as the “baseline” year, just as the Kyoto Protocol does. That is, cuts will be measured against what the world was emitting in 1990. But that baseline isn’t set in stone: As the WSJ notes today, “The parties could however decide to use another base year.”It’s a contentious point. U.S. emissions targets use 2005 as the base year. President Obama, for instance, speaks of curbing emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. That upsets Europe, because it translates into a much smaller cut—between 3% and 5%–from 1990 levels.
What’s in a number? Quite a lot, actually. As Geoff Styles notes, 1990 was a very different world than 2005: A lot of things happened in the meantime, from globalization, the rise of China and India, the decline of Europe, shifts in fuels used for power generation, and so forth.
Europe likes 1990 as a starting point, because the continent’s economies were a lot dirtier then. Russia, especially, likes 1990 because back then the big, dirty Soviet economy was still around (ditto, to a lesser extent, for the rest of Eastern Europe).
It’s easier to make cuts against the bloated past than the cleaner present. Some of Europe’s progress toward meeting its Kyoto targets, for instance, can be chalked up to clean policies in the meantime; but much of the progress simply comes from an easy comparison with a dirtier time....MORE
Pretty wonky but I had to get my two cents in:
- Climateer wrote:
I've been thinking about Enron as the senate debates the Cap-and-trade bill. Here's one of my favorite Enron posts (I'll post more of them next week):....
July 2014 - Remember the 'Dash for Gas' and North Sea Oil? "UK became a net importer of petroleum products in 2013"
It's been 20 years since Enron opened the Teesside power station.
Time flies...
As is the case with so much of this stuff, from carbon trading to wind (GE got in the biz by buying ENE’s wind ops) to nat gas to enriching the lobbyist sector of the economy to fraud on the markets Enron was there first.
Mr. Styles mentions, en passant, Britain’s ‘Dash for Gas” in the early ’90’s to take advantage of the North Sea natural gas finds.
One hulking big example is the 1875 MW Teesside generating plant.
Enron owned it.
Because of it’s 1993 operational date vs.the 1997 Kyoto agreement to use 1990 as a baseline, that one plant cut Britain’s emissions 1% vs the baseline.
The U.S. Kyoto delegation agreed to the 1990 date only on condition that Europe would agree to back Enron’s carbon trading proposals.
Amazing stuff.
As John Palmisano said in his infamous email “”mplications of the Climate Change Agreement in Kyoto & What Transpired”:
“If implemented [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the [electricity] and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States….”
And:
“…This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”
Amazing stuff.
Here’s the email:
http://www.politicalcapitalism.org/enron/121297.pdf