Rosebank Decision Pending as Department Dismisses Reports as Speculation
Reports that the energy secretary is minded to refuse the Rosebank oil field have been met with an on-the-record denial: her department says “this is speculation” and that each project will be assessed on its merits. A decision is expected before the end of the year. The reports rest on unnamed sources.
What Miatta Fahnbulleh has actually said on the record is narrower than the reporting but points in the same direction. Drawing the distinction with Jackdaw, approved on Wednesday, she said: “One is a gasfield that caters for the domestic market, while the other is an oilfield that is mainly for export. It is right that we judge each application in its own right, and it is absolutely critical that the decision is consistent with our climate obligations, our carbon budgets and the end destination we need to get to.” There is nothing on the government’s own publication service beyond the live case file, which does record one fact nobody has written up: the developer changed from Equinor UK to Adura Operations in February. Both fields are applications under existing licences, so neither touches the manifesto commitment to issue no new ones. The chair of the all-party group on climate change, the Labour MP Afzal Khan, said approving Rosebank on top of Jackdaw “cannot be justified”. Jackdaw alone is estimated to add 36 million tonnes of carbon emissions; the reported estimate that Rosebank would emit roughly seven times as much is a newspaper calculation, not an official one.