The UK government is facing a fresh challenge in the courts over plans to award up to 130 new licences for North Sea oil and gas exploration, in the latest attempt to stop ministers’ proposed expansion of the country’s fossil fuel production.
Three campaign groups have written to the business secretary, Grant Shapps, explaining the grounds on which they consider the latest offshore oil and gas licensing round to be unlawful. They call for the decision to award the new licences to be reversed, arguing that new oil and gas exploration and development is incompatible with the UK’s own rules and international climate obligations.
Ministers are also expected to face a legal challenge soon to the decision last week to give the go-ahead for the UK’s first new coalmine for 30 years, at Whitehaven in Cumbria.
Phil Evans, an oil and gas campaigner at Greenpeace, accused the government of attempting to justify unnecessary fossil fuel expansion on the basis that the production facilities would not produce much carbon dioxide, rather than examining the impacts of burning the fuel produced.
Ministers have claimed the Cumbrian mine would be “net zero” in terms of greenhouse gases from the mining the coal, but this ignores the emissions from burning the coal produced.
Similarly, the North Sea oil and gas expansion has been defended as necessary to solve the UK’s energy crisis, but little new gas is likely to be produced for the next decade at least and will not reduce UK gas prices.
“When it comes to carbon, our planning system has a major blind spot,” said Evans. “Ministers keep greenlighting new fossil fuel projects without fully considering the climate-wrecking emissions from burning those fuels. That’s completely irresponsible. It’s like giving an unlit cigarette a quick sniff and concluding that it can’t do much harm.”
He said claims that new North Sea oil and gas was needed to solve the energy crisis, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, which has sent international gas prices soaring, were wrong.
“New coal, oil and gas produced in the UK will do nothing to help lower energy bills, but they will fuel more deadly storms, rising seas, floods and droughts around the world,” he said. “If the UK government wants to retain a shred of credibility on climate, they should stop setting off new climate timebombs and get serious about investing in the solutions. If they don’t, we are ready to challenge them in court.”
The three letters before action, seen by the Guardian, were sent separately by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Uplift, a campaign against North Sea oil and gas, on Monday. Greenpeace is also seeking a judicial review of the government’s licensing round.
The letters, the first step to a legal challenge, are separate to challenges already under way against the Horse Hill oil project in Surrey, the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, and the government’s promise of $1bn (£820m) in finance for a gas megaproject in Mozambique.
A spokesperson for the government told the Guardian: “While we cannot comment on ongoing legal proceedings, it’s vital we continue to maintain our energy security, by boosting our homegrown energy supply and strengthening our domestic resilience.”
The UK’s decision to press ahead with new licences in the North Sea, begun earlier this year under Kwasi Kwarteng’s term as business secretary and continued by his successor, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has dismayed international climate experts.
The UK hosted the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last year, where nations agreed to focus on limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but failed to bring forward the stringent measures needed to meet that goal.
Since then, however, the UK’s international leadership on the climate has been called into question, after a string of decisions including new North Sea licences, the new coalmine, cash for fossil fuel projects in developing countries, and further slashing of overseas aid. Alok Sharma, the president of Cop26, was thrown out of the cabinet by Rishi Sunak and no longer has an official climate role, while the climate minister, Graham Stuart, has also been stripped of cabinet responsibilities.
The government’s decision to go ahead with the Whitehaven mine was queried on Friday by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. He told the Guardian in an interview that his officials were closely examining the government’s claims that the mine would be compatible with net zero goals and the move away from coal internationally, and that he would speak out if he found otherwise.
“Coal is not exactly the direction that the world is trying to move in, or needs to move in. What I want to know is the level of abatement here [such as whether the resulting greenhouse gases will be captured and stored] and the comparison of this particular process in the production of steel,” he said.
