“It’s a mature basin. There’s barely any gas left”
Kemi Badenoch is set to make a speech in Scotland tomorrow, in which she will say that a Tory government would “get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea”.
The Labour government has banned all new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, but the Tories, who are trying to outflank Reform, want to do the opposite.
However, climate change lawyer and founder of Uplift, Tessa Khan, explained that the Tories’ bold claim that we can get all of our oil and gas from the North Sea is wrong, because “most of it’s been extracted”.
On Channel 4 News yesterday, Khan said: “The reality now is that it is a mature basin. There’s barely any gas left. We export the vast majority of the oil.”
Around 80% of the oil extracted by UK private companies in the North Sea is sold to international markets, rather than to the UK.
Badenoch said it was “absurd” the UK was leaving “vital resources untapped” while “neighbours like Norway extracted them from the same sea bed”.
Khan explained that unlike the UK government, Norway has been “very interventionist” in managing the way oil and gas is extracted from the North Sea. In addition, Norway has access to oil and gas in the Barents sea.
The environmental lawyer said: “If the Conservative Party was going to do something about this, it should have been 50 years ago.”
In a thread on X, Khan also said: “The North Sea has been declining for decades, which is why the 100s of licences the Tories issued in the last decade have produced a grand total of 16 days worth of gas.”
Badenoch, who has accepted over £16,000 in donations from climate sceptic Neil Record, declared at an event in March, hosted by an ad agency with Shell as a client, that hitting net-zero emissions by 2050 was “impossible” and would leave the UK “bankrupting ourselves”.
A Labour spokesperson said: “We’ll take no lectures from Kemi Badenoch. Every family and business paid the price of the Conservatives’ failure to secure the UK’s energy.”
They added exploring new oil and gas fields would “not take a penny off bills” or improve energy security and would “only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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