Not Zero – Why Rosebank Won’t Help

Craig DalzellThe UK Government has now approved licences for the Rosebank oil field in the north of Scotland. If opened, it will reduce the UK’s chances of meeting its Paris climate targets to zero as those targets can now only be met if no new oil fields are opened and the existing open ones are closed before they reach the point of maximum economic extraction. This policy is therefore abject and deliberate climate denial and comes off the back of a string of climate denial policies emanating from London since UK Labour showed weakness over the ULEZ story and the Tories decided they could win votes among their base by kicking green policies into the increasingly brown, parched and burning grass.The Scottish Government had their chance to find the courage of their convictions on the future of Scottish oil and gas. They spent months equivocating and playing both sides against the middle. Which is slightly unfortunate considering that they also tried to place themselves in that middle. They spent months of telling everyone that they’d support the field but only if it passed a series of “climate checkpoints” without actually saying what those checkpoints were or whether they thought Rosebank could pass them. They didn’t say what “not supporting” the policy would mean in practice despite having various tools at their devolved disposal that could be used to take a stand against it. Now that the licences have been approved, First Minister Humza Yousaf could only register his “disappointment” at the plan without saying anything about what he’d do in response.The UK Government and its allies are making claims about Rosebank which continue to fail any kind of reasonable test on their own grounds. Not on climate, not on jobs, not on energy security and not on emissions.

Emissions – Nearer oil is cleaner, isn’t it?

This is the core claim when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the UK. If we create domestic supply, then we don’t need to transport oil from across the world and add in all of the transport emissions to the climate cost of the oil. It’s a reasonable argument and in many cases, for many goods, it would stack up (see our Common Home Plan’s chapter on trade for more on that) but in this case there’s a complication in that due to inadequate regulations the way that the UK allows oil to be extracted is much dirtier than many other places where we import similar products. Norway, for example, banned the flaring of gas from oil wells and therefore cut their emissions well below the point where Norwegian gas imported to the UK is cleaner than domestic gas even after transport is accounted for. Yes, hydrocarbons from leaking American fracking sites might be dirtier than our domestic gas but then, folk like Liz Truss want to bring fracking to the UK too and she apparently now either has the ear of Rishi Sunak, or at least has the ear of the rivals he’s responding to.

Energy Security – We must let supply meet demand!

One of the other climate policies that Sunak has rolled back on is on home retrofits and the decarbonisation of home heating so of course he’s going to be grasping to increase oil and gas supplies to meet the future demand that he’s creating by keeping people in cold homes with obsolete boilers. (Not that Scotland is doing much better here – give me a couple more weeks and I’ll continue the story of my own journey in trying to retrofit our house.)It should be clear now that your cold home, your fuel poverty and much of your energy demand is entirely a matter of political choice. Proponents point to the war in Ukraine and how it caused an energy price spike but it was entirely the political choices of the UK that led you to being vulnerable to that spike. If decades of housing policy had meant you were living in a passive energy home that barely required external heating and if the price of renewable energy wasn’t fundamentally linked to gas despite no physical reason for doing so then you would not have required government help to survive last winter and would not now be wondering how you’ll cope this winter with that help almost certainly not coming back.You won’t even get cheaper oil as a result of this decision. As large as Rosebank its products will still be sold at the global market rate and that market is still largely determined by the oil cartels like OPEC. You don’t need to be buying oil directly from warmongers and dictators to have your prices set by them. Your energy security has been made much worse by the choices that led up to the approval of Rosebank, not better.

Protecting Jobs – But not here.

I’m reminded of the Scottish Government’s bold move to ban the extraction of coal from Scotland – bold because it came a decade after the last economic extraction of coal from Scotland therefore the ban resulted in not a single mine closure or unemployed miner. I can understand the hesitancy to do the same given that oil workers are still active and in jobs. This is the point of trying to achieve a Just Transition – especially one of the kind actively advocated by the workers themselves.Rosebank won’t do this though. It won’t protect jobs by helping them transition to the future. It’ll also do far less to protect British jobs than its proponents claim. The licence has been granted to Equinor – the Norwegian state-owned energy company. This means that they’ll very likely be shipping in their own staff especially in the areas where the jobs are dependent on the phase of the project – like prospecting and construction – or in areas that aren’t dependent on being at the location – like administration and R&D. Further, as a state-owned energy company the profits of the oil will be leaving the UK and going into the coffers of the Norwegian government allowing them to support Norwegian public services and Norwegian jobs. So in that sense, the claim is true and the licences will create jobs – just not quite in the way that the UK Government would like you to think.

Not Zero – How Green is the Black, Black Oil?

The line that tipped me right over the edge in the Rosebank licence announcement was the one that said that the licence had been granted “taking net zero considerations into account throughout the project's lifecycle”. I would love to see any proponent of Rosebank explain how the development will be Net Zero across its lifetime. Of course, it won’t be. They are taking a very selective view of what it means to be “net zero”.There are, broadly, three categories of climate emissions. Scope 1 emissions are the emissions created directly by a good or process. If your factory emits carbon directly as a result of its operations, the stuff coming out of the exhaust chimney is counted as Scope 1. Scope 2 is an indirect emission created as a result of the process. If your factory is entirely electrically powered, but the power generator you’re hooked up to is a coal or gas boiler, that’s a Scope 2 emission for your factory (and a Scope 1 emission for the owner of the generator). Scope 3 covers “everything else” including what the goods your factor produces are used for.I last discussed this in reference to Edinburgh Airport who said they were committed to eliminating Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions from their buildings and ground vehicles but were not counting their Scope 3 emissions – that is, the carbon emission created by the aircraft flying into and out of the airport.A similar trick is being played here. Rosebank operators claim that their oil rigs will be electrically powered and the electricity will be renewably sourced (eventually) but they won’t be running renewable helicopters to and from the rigs any time soon, there simply isn’t a reliable plan in place to ensure that construction and decommissioning will be “net zero” and, of course, the extracted oil isn’t just getting bottled up and put on a shelf – the vast majority of it will be burned (despite the “other uses” we have for oil). Claiming that Rosebank will be Net Zero is pretty much like claiming that your diesel car is “net zero” because the radio is powered by the battery.

What next for Scotland?

I’ve already laid out what Scotland should be doing. Equivocation time is long past over for the Scottish Government. Either they need to support this licence and accept that they, too, have abandoned climate targets and joined the ranks of climate denialism that is spreading during this critical time or they need to start actually resisting this and other new polluting policies in Scotland. We need to see a statement of intent from Scotland that no devolved planning permissions will be issued that will aid, abet or support Rosebank, that public funding will not be granted to companies involved in this and other new oil and gas, that public investments like pensions will be actively withdrawn from companies complicit in the climate emergency and that Just Transition plans will not just be maintained (as per the FM’s “disappointed” statement) but will be actively increased with a view of actively disrupting the oil and gas sector by transitioning their key personnel.Either we’re in a climate emergency or we’re not. If the Scottish Government still believes we are, we need to see them start acting like it.