People talk about North Sea oil now like it’s a sort of patriotic buried treasure. Just drill a few more holes, wave a Union Jack at an offshore platform and suddenly Britain is immune from global energy markets, Vladimir Putin and the price of diesel at Tesco. Nigel Farage says it. Kemi Badenoch says it. Plenty of people on Facebook say it as well, usually underneath a dramatic sunset photo of an oil rig, as though it’s HMS Victory rather than a lump of industrial plumbing sticking out of cold water.
Except that isn’t how any of this works.
Even if we approved a brand new North Sea field tomorrow, there’s a fair chance I’ll be dead before the thing is producing meaningful quantities. These projects are measured in decades, not in the sort of timescale politicians operate on between reshuffles, leadership contests and emergency interviews outside No.10 pretending they fully support somebody they were privately denouncing three days earlier.
And when it finally does come online, the oil doesn’t arrive in a little tanker labelled FOR BRITISH USE ONLY. It gets sold into global markets because that’s how oil works. Britain already exports oil while importing oil at the same time. Which sounds faintly absurd until you realise different refineries need different grades of crude and the whole thing operates like a giant international swap shop connected by pipelines and lawyers.
What’s often left out of the political shouting is that the government has not actually ordered the North Sea to be filled with concrete and handed back to the haddock. Existing fields are continuing. Existing licences are continuing and in some cases being extended. Production is still happening. Previously approved developments are still proceeding.
Which is probably the sensible middle ground. You keep extracting from infrastructure that already exists while gradually transitioning the wider energy system, rather than pretending Britain can become carbon neutral by next Tuesday or, alternatively, that the entire global energy transition is a conspiracy invented by people who’ve never had to phone British Gas while standing next to a boiler making a noise like a cement mixer full of cutlery.
What interests me more is the strange overlap between what politicians say is happening and what they’re simultaneously asking taxpayers to fund.
We’re increasingly being asked to use public money, tax breaks, underwriting and regulatory guarantees to support exploration for a product politicians simultaneously insist we must eventually stop using. And this is happening during a cost of living crisis, collapsing local government finances, crumbling infrastructure and public services still trying to recover after years of austerity and underinvestment.
Councils are effectively going bankrupt. NHS waiting lists have finally started coming down again under Labour after reaching extraordinary levels, but that recovery requires sustained spending, not billions diverted into cushioning commercial fossil fuel risk. Schools are still holding cake sales to buy equipment. Around here half the potholes are now familiar enough that I instinctively steer round them without consciously thinking about it, like old tree stumps.
Yet somehow we’re also supposed to believe there’s endless public money available to reduce uncertainty for multinational energy firms exploring for hydrocarbons that may not meaningfully come online for another decade.
That’s where it all starts becoming faintly surreal.
It’s rather like the government announcing in 1984 that the future clearly belongs to compact discs and digital technology, but in the meantime taxpayers should probably underwrite a massive new Betamax factory in Sunderland just to be safe. Not because Betamax was useless. In some ways it was technically better. But history was already drifting elsewhere and everyone knew it, even if they didn’t entirely know how quickly.
And before somebody says “Ah, but we still need oil and gas”, yes, obviously we do. I’m sitting in a house full of plastics, wiring, transport systems and chemical products largely derived from hydrocarbons. My car contains enough oil-derived material to start a small diplomatic incident. Modern civilisation is not going to continue purely through moral superiority and positive thinking.
But that’s different from pretending every new North Sea licence is some kind of Churchillian act of national salvation.
Then there’s the tax argument.
The industry likes to talk about risk when prices are low and profits when prices are high. Governments are encouraged to offer investment allowances, tax relief, decommissioning support and regulatory certainty because otherwise the economics become unattractive. In other words, the taxpayer helps cushion the downside.
But if the field turns out to be wildly profitable after all, we are suddenly informed this is a triumph of private enterprise and entrepreneurial brilliance.
Quite the arrangement, really.
And that’s before we get to the really awkward bit.
Supporters often talk as though future North Sea production will shower the Treasury with tax receipts for decades. But that depends on strong long-term fossil fuel demand and on squeezing ever more value from a basin that has already been declining for years. Yet at the same time, government policy is explicitly aimed at reducing hydrocarbon dependence through electrification, renewables, insulation, EVs and changes to electricity pricing.
So which is it?
Are we building an economy designed to consume less oil and gas over time, or are we underwriting new exploration on the assumption we’ll still be consuming enough of it to generate large future tax revenues from a mature and declining basin?
Because those two things sit in rather uncomfortable tension with each other.
Meanwhile the government is also trying to redesign the electricity market so renewable power is no longer tied so tightly to volatile gas prices. At the moment gas often still sets the wholesale electricity price even when renewables are generating much of the power more cheaply. Which is why windy days can still coincide with bills that make people stare silently at the smart meter as though it has personally betrayed them.
So the long-term direction is already fairly obvious. More renewables, more storage, more electrification, more grid balancing, and gradually less dependence on gas setting the overall price.
And when that transition succeeds, when electricity genuinely becomes cheaper and less exposed to global gas shocks, there’s a fair chance that some of the very politicians currently warning that the transition is too fast will eventually start asking why previous governments didn’t move faster.
Why are we still exposed to international gas prices?
Why didn’t Britain secure cheaper domestic electricity earlier?
Why are British businesses paying more than competitors abroad?
Because political memory has a remarkable habit of resetting itself the moment somebody crosses the floor into opposition.
Of course the job of an opposition is to oppose. Nobody expects Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage to pop up saying “actually, fair enough, carry on”. That would be a fairly short political career. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape the feeling that modern opposition politics is turning into little more than knee-jerk contradiction. Government says something and opposition instinctively lunges in the opposite direction before anyone’s had time to check whether it actually makes sense.
You’d still hope there might be some remaining connection to logic, engineering reality and basic economic sanity somewhere in the process, rather than everything collapsing into whichever slogan currently fits on a Facebook graphic next to a flaming oil rig.
None of this means the transition is easy. Far from it. There are massive engineering, storage and infrastructure problems still to solve. Move too fast and you risk deindustrialisation, energy insecurity and a public backlash the first winter the lights flicker or heating bills spike again. Move too slowly and you pour billions into infrastructure which may become economically obsolete before it has properly paid for itself.
That’s the real argument underneath all the slogans. Not the pantomime version where one side wants us all living in caves eating moss while the other thinks a drilling licence issued in 2026 will somehow stop Britain participating in international energy markets.
And underpinning all this is the modern political habit of privatising upside while socialising risk. If these fields are such obvious commercial goldmines, why does the industry keep needing tax incentives, underwriting and favourable regulatory treatment? Genuine no-brainer investments usually don’t require the taxpayer standing behind them holding the financial smelling salts.
Still, none of this fits neatly onto a Facebook meme. Most people just want the lights to come on, the bills to stop behaving like ransom demands, and the heating to work without feeling they’ve entered a geopolitical hostage negotiation every time they touch the thermostat.
Though admittedly it would still make a magnificent Betamax training video.
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