A think tank set up by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has urged the Starmer government to reverse the decline in the country’s oil and gas industry, saying its revival could boost the economy by 165 billion pounds, equal to $224.42 billion.
In a paper titled Why Britain Needs an Energy-Strategy Reset, senior policy advisor on climate and energy policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Tone Langengen called for a rearrangement of priorities in energy and a change of focus from emissions only.
“This narrow focus on whether power is clean means the system has lost sight of whether it is cheap, secure and capable of powering a modern economy,” Langengen wrote, noting that energy affordability specifically needs a lot more attention.
She went on to say that North Sea oil and gas cannot make a material contribution to lower electricity prices for Britons but that did not make them irrelevant for the UK economy. The oil and gas industry is in decline, the analyst wrote, but “current policy is accelerating that decline beyond what is economically or strategically necessary.”
There may be an estimated 7.5 billion barrels in oil and gas still recoverable from the UK portion of the North Sea. These barrels could be worth 165 billion in total and help the country rely more on domestic energy supply than imports. This would be in line with the Labour government’s prioritization of “home-grown power”, Of course, the focus is not just on power being home-grown—it must also be ‘clean”, meaning wind and solar.
The Telegraph cited an unnamed source from the Labour party as responding to the Blair think-tank paper with a dismissal: “The mainstream, centre-ground position, backed by the economics and British business, is that getting off expensive fossil fuel markets controlled by petrostates and dictators, and onto clean home-grown power, is the right choice for Britain.”
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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