No future for Gas

No future for Gas

Green Party Councillor Jamie Osborne challenges the accepted think surrounding our use and reliance on fossil fuels

Sometimes you have to wonder whether political leaders who advocate getting “every cubic inch of oil and gas” out of the North Sea to provide energy security – as Jacob Rees-Mogg recently proposed – know what they are talking about.For a start, anyone who works in the oil and gas industry will tell you that technically it’s barely possible, and certainly not financially viable, to get “every cubic inch” of fossil fuel out of reserves.

The more gas is extracted from a reserve, the harder it gets to access what remains, and eventually the energy and risk required to continue pumping it out is simply not worth it. Rees-Mogg makes grand claims for the potential of the UK’s oil and gas industry, but the industry itself is more cautious.

Technical difficulties aside, it is a fallacy to think that producing more gas in the UK can reduce energy bills. Government ministers have been saying that we need to expand UK fossil fuels in order to get off Russian gas. But the amount of gas we import from Russia is comparatively tiny: about 3% of our total gas use, or the same amount as we get from Trinidad and Tobago.

And even if we did rely on Russian gas, boosting UK production would not reduce prices this winter or any time soon. There are three reasons for this.

First, it would take years to get new gas onstream.

Second, even if more UK gas started flowing by the end of the decade, the price of it would be determined by international wholesale costs. The volatility in international gas markets has been worsened by Russia’s appalling invasion of Ukraine, but Russia’s actions are not the sole cause: energy bills were rising long before Putin started amassing troops.

The third reason is perhaps the most important: gas is no longer cheap. It is increasingly being outstripped in terms of affordability and capacity by renewables.

Only 40% of the UK’s electricity is now produced from gas, with the majority coming from far cheaper renewables and nuclear, and renewables’ share of the market is growing rapidly. Solar power is now far and away the cheapest form of energy (nine times cheaper than gas in fact), and when used to power a heat pump in a well-insulated home, can bring fuel bills to virtually zero. Producing hydrogen – touted as a pollution-free alternative to gas – from wind power will be cheaper by the end of the decade than producing it from North Sea methane.

And this comparison of the costs doesn’t account for climate change. The International Energy Agency, the world’s leading authority on energy, said last year that no new oil and gas fields can be developed if we are to stay within relatively safe climate change limits. The UK Government’s recent granting of almost 100 new licences for oil and gas exploration in nearly 900 locations is in direct contradiction to the science and the economics of climate change.

This should come as a stark warning to those in Norfolk – including many of our MPs and local councillors – who are celebrating the Government’s plans to make Norfolk a “gas powerhouse”.

But the shift away from gas should also be an opportunity. The renewable industry is already the fastest growing energy sector, and Norfolk has huge potential to expand offshore and onshore wind, green hydrogen production, and solar power. The leaps and bounds being made in energy storage technology, including battery storage and hydrogen, are removing constraints to the energy transition, and can be helped along by improving the energy efficiency of housing and transport.

All of this clean energy can be accelerated if the government allows swifter licensing and deployment of renewable energy, wind and solar in particular, through planning and investment.

So when it comes to the energy crisis, we are not facing a choice between UK gas and Russian gas, or between the environment and the economy. The real choice is between an outdated, polluting and increasingly expensive energy source – gas – and the renewables that offer Norfolk an unprecedented growth opportunity.