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The UK reaped an important benefit of Brexit last week. Unlike the EU’s unelected de facto dictator Ursula von der Leyen and her unaccountable army of fake meritechnocrats – who are bent upon deindustrialising Europe – Keir Starmer is still vulnerable to electoral pressure. And so, with massive oil and gas shortages expected to arrive in the UK next month, with the very best case pointing to big rises in energy, fuel and food prices, Starmer decided to break ranks with the EU and relax sanctions on fuel refined from Russian oil.
In and of itself, this is unlikely to affect the growing crisis resulting from Trump’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz – the Russian oil was already going somewhere and so isn’t adding anything new to the mix – but it could allow the UK to stave off some of what are expected to be big diesel fuel shortages… although most likely the UK government is still thinking in monetary rather than supply terms.
More interesting though, has been the opposition response. The decision is widely seen as a capitulation to Putin – although one imagines that those most vociferously calling for sanctions will be the first to break down in tears when the lights go off and food can no longer be transported to the supermarkets. In any case, if the EU/NATO technocracy had any affective response to Russia, they would have already deployed it. And since energy sanctions have done far more harm to Europe and the UK (Russia has simply diverted exports to China and India) ending the self-harm in the face of the biggest energy shock the world has ever seen makes sense.
Predictably, the self-identifying left has called for the deployment of more non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (mostly made in China these days) as if these could be deployed in a matter of days. In any case, even the most zealous net zero adherents have to concede that there is currently no alternative to fossil fuels in our globally interconnected transport networks… which – along with spiralling electricity prices – is a key reason that the political right is calling for net zero to be scrapped.
Insofar as there is anything beyond quasi-religious zealotry behind the current – ‘green capitalist’ – version of net zero, it is the dubious claim that ‘doing something is better than doing nothing.’ But to much of the rest of the world, the UK’s self-immolation is more a cautionary tale about ungrounded technocracy than the supposed virtuous example that everyone else was meant to follow. Which is why the political right has developed an equally deluded mythology of its own.
This was on display in parliament last week when Tory leader Kemi Badenoch linked the relaxation of sanctions with the failure to extend new licences to drill in the North Sea. As if issuing new licences – any more than approving more wind farms – would result in huge volumes of new oil and gas arriving in the UK within weeks in order to fill the massive shortage of oil and gas from the Gulf States.
In the real world meanwhile, any recovery of new oil and gas is a decades-long, multi-billion-pound endeavour… something that will require a cross-party consensus to have any chance of succeeding. Otherwise, as Juliet Samuel at the Telegraph wrote three years ago:
“The meeting goes like this: ‘We need you!’ say the politicians. The producers scratch their heads as they mull $20 billion, 20-year investments, and wonder whether, when the war is over and the green bandwagon rolls back into town, the politicians will still sound so sweet on them. ‘Your green targets still say we need to shut down by 2030,’ they point out. To which Europe says: ‘Well, of course. Fossil fuels are evil!’”
It is worth noting that it is 62 years since the first oil well was drilled in the UK sector of the North Sea. In the six decades 1964-2024, 47.7 barrels of oil equivalent of oil and gas have been produced in the UK sector of the North Sea, with a further accessible 2.6 billion barrels remaining… in short, the UK sector of the North Sea is a very mature basin with more than 90 percent of its content already drained. A further 6.2 billion barrels of ‘contingent resources’ might become recoverable if high ($150+) prices could be sustained and if technological development enabled drilling in much harsher conditions (most of the remaining oil is in the north Atlantic rather than the relatively sheltered North Sea). This though, is unlikely given that current prices around $100 are already crushing economic demand and generating higher unemployment and business failures.
Indeed, the Labour government’s recent vote to end North Sea drilling licences permanently was likely unnecessary – although it does pacify environmentalist activists while luring the political right into repeating foolish claims about the UK having centuries of potential energy independence. In fact, allowing new licences would be the easiest means of crushing these myths, since very little of the oil and gas that remains is going to be profitable to produce anyway. So that, when none of the oil companies turn up for the auction, then we can have a sensible conversation about how else we might maintain some semblance of energy security… and, most likely, how we reorganise the UK economy to cope with far less and more costly energy in future.
This is because, even if the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow, it might take years to return the region to the levels of production before Trump’s war. Moreover, oil – actual crude rather than the mendaciously labelled ‘petroleum products’ – production peaked in November 2018. And the critical ‘middle distillates’ (diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel) have not recovered since. Add to this the new geopolitics, with a large part of the flows that used to come to Europe now diverting to Asia, and it is difficult to see how the UK can escape the economic consequences of a big reduction in its energy supply.
There again, it will probably take the impact of a major prolonged energy shock to wake our political class from the energy myths that have lulled them to sleep in recent years.
As you made it to the end…
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