North Sea oil is becoming a hot topic. During his recent state visit, US president Donald Trump urged UK prime minister Keir Starmer to “drill, baby, drill”. Meanwhile, Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has promised to “maximise extraction” and Reform UK has said drilling for more North Sea oil and gas would be a “day one” priority. The appeal of reducing dependency on foreign energy imports is strong, but relying on the North Sea fields filling the energy gap has one big problem: there is not enough oil and gas down there.
Oil and gas production in the North Sea peaked in 1999 and has since more than halved. The easy discoveries have gone and the remaining fields tend to be smaller, more remote and more technically challenging to extract. Writing in the Conversation, the energy expert Dr Mark Ireland, from Newcastle University, said: “Even if a future government relaxes exploration licensing rules, geology will remain the bigger constraint.”
If new exploration licences were to be granted a small increase in production could be achieved, and Nils Pratley, the Guardian’s financial editor, has made the case for boosting production temporarily and strategically, to reduce reliance on imported gas and give time to grow renewables. But new projects will compete with easier pickings in the Middle East and north Africa, for example. Lack of oil and lack of investors could mean North Sea oil is purely a political pipe dream.