Both the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields have had a chequered history. Both were discovered in the mid-2000s and were initially approved for development in 2023 and 2022, respectively. But the approvals were overturned in 2025 because the Government had not taken into account the Scope 3 emissions arising from burning the hydrocarbons once they had been extracted.
Previous Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has described the decision to issue a development licence to Rosebank as “climate vandalism.” But now new Prime Minister Andy Burnham and new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh have vowed to take a more “pragmatic” approach to the North Sea. The decision to approve both fields has allegedly been pushed back to this month because of the “optics” of approving new oil and gas licences during a heatwave. Stop press: the decision might now be postponed beyond the Holborn and St Pancras by-election because of pressure from the Greens.
Sensing weakness in the Government, the green industrial complex has ramped up the rhetoric with the Guardian claiming a new analysis calculated that £119 billion to £336 billion of economic damage would be caused by burning the hydrocarbons produced by Rosebank and Jackdaw, or £170–483 billion under a high production scenario. This article looks at the source of those claims and tests their veracity.
Source of Jackdaw and Rosebank damage claims
The Guardian made reference to a research article produced by Luke Hatton under the auspices of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The reason the alleged damages are so high is they use a social cost of carbon of $754/t to $1,538/t or £572/t to £1,167/t at a GBP:USD exchange rate of 1.381. These are simply astronomical numbers and compare to the current UK carbon price of about £60/t. To make the damage numbers even bigger, they then escalate the cost of carbon by 2% for each year of the life of the field.
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