The green light for Jackdaw is a small victory for common sense

It will likely only be brief, but the government is in danger of looking half-sensible. Not only has John Healey backtracked from imposing a Capital Gains Tax rise on business, but the new energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh has this morning announced that the development of the Jackdaw gas field can go ahead. The case for it is overwhelming, even on environmental grounds. The gas, which the owners say could start flowing within months, will be fed directly into the UK gas grid, with fewer carbon emissions than the gas it will displace: liquified natural gas (LNG) imported by ship from the US and elsewhere. Critics keep parroting the line that it won’t take a penny off consumers’ gas bills because ‘it will just be sold on global markets at the global price’, but this is fundamentally untrue. There is no global gas price: wholesale gas prices are highly regionalised owing to the expense of transporting gas over large distances where no pipeline system exists. North Sea gas will be cheaper than imported LNG gas, though it won’t be enough to counter the general rise in gas prices this year because Jackdaw will only account for 6 per cent of UK production. As for other possible new fields in the North Sea, forget it Needless to say, the green lobby is up in arms. Few climate activists are interested in the details; for them, opposing oil and gas development is purely an emotional response. The idea of developing a new oil or gas field is a symbolic rejection of their demands for ‘no new oil and gas’, and that is all that matters. The government isn’t going to be too bothered about Green leader Zack Polanski describing the Jackdaw field as ‘environmental vandalism’, although Burnham was sufficiently worried about how it would play with Labour voters to delay the Jackdaw announcement until after the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. What, though, are Labour MPs going to make of it? Burnham only has so much political capital he can spend before he starts upsetting his backbenchers to the point at which they start to wonder why they anointed him leader in the first place. Jackdaw will come with a hefty price tag as far as some of them are concerned. Most popular Gavin Mortimer The dark horse who stands to benefit from France’s riots Steerpike Labour backbenchers throw tantrum over Jackdaw Druin Burch The irony of the Palestinian poppy Some will likely try to claim that today’s decision breaks a manifesto commitment, given that the Labour party’s 2024 manifesto contained the sentence: We will not issue new licenses to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. Leave aside the dishonesty inherent in the statements on bills, energy security and worsening the climate crisis for a moment. Does this not mean that Burnham has just torn up Starmer’s manifesto? No, because the 2024 document also stated: ‘Labour will not revoke existing licences.’ Jackdaw was granted a licence under the Conservatives, though this was then overturned by the courts, which ruled the then government hadn’t taken into account Britain’s net zero target when making the decision. So it is not really a new licence, more a confirmation of an existing one. In any case, it can be argued that Jackdaw is not a new field at all, but what is known in the industry as a ‘tieback’ – new production linked to an existing field’s infrastructure. Even Ed Miliband at one stage suggested he might look favourably on tiebacks. Whether Rosebank will go ahead is another matter. Burnham, who likes to be liked, may well come to the conclusion that handing Labour pragmatists one decision and giving the other to Labour’s green tendency will balance things out and keep him popular. He is like a football ref who decides not to give a second foul against the blue team, not on the basis of what he sees but because he is afraid of appearing to be biased. As for other possible new fields in the North Sea, forget it. So long as we have a net zero target, activists are always going to challenge oil and gas development. Their chances of winning will keep on increasing, because any field likely to be in production after 2050 will be a clear breach of the target, unless a government can show that the emissions from the oil and gas will be entirely mitigated in some form, such as carbon capture and storage. Incidentally, we are still waiting for this in spite of this and the previous government both promising £20 billion to develop the technology. Jackdaw is a small victory for common sense. The very much greater victory – abandoning the 2050 net zero target – still seems a long, long way off.