Blair wrong about oil and gas. Former prime minister Tony Blair’s recent essay into Labour’s failings called on the government (amongst other things) to abandon net zero and restrictions on North Sea oil and gas. But can the North Sea really save us?
Writing in Byline Times Substack on 29 May, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed points out that between 2010 and 2024, 14 years of Conservative drilling policy issued around 400 new exploration licences. Twenty fields were actually built. Their total lifetime production, at full exhaustion, will deliver the equivalent of six months of UK gas demand – two hours and 12 minutes per licence. The most recent renewables auction will offset 50 times that, every year, indefinitely. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has calculated a £364 billion fiscal hit from Britain’s continued reliance on global gas markets through 2050. Modelled across every realistic price scenario, the Treasury loses money on a typical new North Sea field.
New licensing fails on its own chosen criteria: a wealth-transfer mechanism dressed up as energy policy. Work by Paul Brockway, Associate Professor at the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Leeds and colleagues at the University, published in Nature Energy, shows that fossil fuel returns globally are dropping roughly 10% every quarter-century at the point the energy is actually used – the plug, the pump, the boiler. Solar and wind at the same point of use already do better than fossil fuels, and they are getting better still. Britain has crossed the line. Maybe Tony’s Blair and his Institute for Global Change (TBI) had not noticed.
On the other hand Patrick Galey, the head of fossil fuel investigations at the non-governmental organisation Global Witness, said: “Blair’s well-documented links to petrostates and oil and gas companies ought to alone be enough to disqualify this man as an independent and reliable arbiter of what’s possible or common sense in the energy transition.” These links include signing a multi million deal advising the Saudi government, and in 2024 the institute advised the oil-rich state Azerbaijan, which controversially hosted the Cop 29 gathering.
Blair asks: “Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy?” Galey answers that it is a question from 1995. Cheap and clean are now the same thing. The question from most people now is when will this be reflected in our energy bills?