UK Weighs Rosebank Oilfield Approval With CCS Condition
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Rosebank and Jackdaw face sharply different calculations: Jackdaw is a small gasfield producing roughly 24m tonnes of CO2 over 11 years with gas piped domestically, while Rosebank is a large oilfield generating around 250m tonnes over 25 years with oil shipped to the Netherlands for refining.
- Rosebank would still be producing oil in 2050, when the UK is legally required to hit net zero under the Climate Change Act and when the International Energy Agency expects global oil demand to be falling.
- Equinor, one of Rosebank's owners, has used carbon capture and storage at Norway's Sleipner field since 1996 and reportedly stored over 20m tonnes of CO2 without leakage, providing a precedent for tying CCS to new approvals.
- The UK government could make Rosebank's consent conditional on joining the CCS programme and paying to capture and store the equivalent of its own emissions from 2035 onwards, since most of its CO2 comes from burning the oil downstream.
- The North Sea Transition Authority has licensed 21 CCS projects at various stages of development, though Rosebank itself is not currently one of them.
- North Sea decommissioning of around 1,700 wells over the next six years could generate up to 25,000 UK jobs and £6.8bn in economic benefit, far outnumbering the 3,500 development jobs and 880 operational jobs Rosebank and Jackdaw's operators claim they would create.
- UK oil and gas sector employment fell from 441,000 to 213,000 between 2013 and 2023, driven by the exhaustion of the British North Sea basin rather than climate policy, with around 90% of the UK's oil and gas already extracted.
- The article calls on the government to publish a net zero transition roadmap for the next 25 years, noting France has already produced one.
Why it matters: Rosebank would emit roughly 250m tonnes of CO2 over 25 years and still be producing oil in 2050, the UK's statutory net-zero deadline, so unconditional approval would directly undermine the Climate Change Act. Tying consent to mandatory carbon capture from 2035 forces operators to internalise the climate cost the oil and gas industry has so far refused to acknowledge.
Ask SkimNews
