Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said the UK will need fossil fuels for “decades to come” as the UK moves to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions, after being urged to oppose the Equinor ASA’s Rosebank oil field project in the North Sea.
“It makes absolutely no sense not to invest in the resources we have here at home, to import foreign fossil fuels, not to create jobs here, and to import them with twice the carbon emissions of our local resources,” Sunak said to lawmakers in weekly questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday. “It’s an economically illiterate policy.”
Sunak was responding to a question from Green Party Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas, who said giving Rosebank the green light would “turn off climate targets”. EU lawmakers have said burning oil and gas extracted from the field would generate carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to those produced annually by the 28 lowest-income nations combined.
The International Energy Agency has said there can be no new oil and gas production if the world is to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Regulators have yet to give final consent for Rosebank, which Equinor would develop under an existing licence. Equinor wants to make a final investment decision on the project, located west of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, before the end of June.
The company will not start pumping oil and gas until at least 2026. Daily production of 70,000 barrels of oil and 21 million cubic feet of gas, expected by 2027, would make it one of the UK’s largest fields .
