The leader of the UK’s Conservative Party has called for a return to oil and gas production from the North Sea to bring energy costs down.
Reporting on an upcoming speech to be delivered by Kemi Badenoch tomorrow, the BBC wrote that the Tory leader will call for extracting “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea” and reverse net-zero policies pursued by the current Labour government, for which voters are “paying the price through higher energy bills”.
Last Friday, Badenoch wrote on X that “Labour are shutting down North Sea extraction, so we buy more gas from Norway who extract from the very same basin. This is mad, does nothing for the planet and means even higher energy bills. A Conservative government will extract British energy for jobs, growth and security.”
The Tory governments that were in power over the four years to 2024 were all in favor of an energy transition and significantly curbed oil and gas activity in the North Sea through regulation and, notoriously, the windfall profit tax instituted in late 2022 in response to oil companies’ record profits driven by the surge in oil prices after the February incursion of Russian troops into the Ukraine.
Since then, profits have subsided, but the windfall tax remains and was even hiked by the Labour government of Keir Starmer. In addition, the government suspended all new oil and gas exploration license issuing as part of its net-zero efforts. These focus on building out a substantial amount of wind and solar power generating capacity, including on prime farmland, which has inflamed rural communities across the country and spurred them into action, protesting utility-scale solar installations planned for some of the most productive agricultural regions in the UK.
A government spokesman responded to Badenoch’s statement by saying new oil and gas production will neither reduce electricity bills nor improve the UK’s energy security, but only compromise the fight against climate change, according to the BBC report.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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