Dozens of academics, environmental professionals and members of civil society have this week published an open letter to the Secretary of State at the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, arguing for specific conditions to be attached to licenses granted to the proposed Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gas fields, which are currently under consideration.
The letter does not argue for or against the granting of licenses. Instead, it sets out the conditions the authors say must be in place in order to reconcile any development of these fields with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050.
In line with the “polluter pays” principle, the authors argue, fossil fuel companies – not consumers – should bear the cost of cleaning up the environmental harm caused by the products they sell. In the case of new oil and gas licences, this means that fossil fuel companies should be required to permanently store a rising fraction of CO2 emissions as a condition of receiving approval for new extraction.
“This is not a ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ for the fossil fuel industry”, says Professor Myles Allen, Head of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors of the letter. “We need to achieve deep and rapid emissions reductions in order to limit the worst impacts of warming and reach net zero by 2050. Rather, it is a way to deal with emissions that are ‘hard to abate’, such as those from cement and steel production, or aviation, where alternative processes and fuels are not yet available at scale. It is also the case that we cannot rely on the biosphere to passively soak up all of the emissions we are producing. This is why IPCC pathways and the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget identify carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) as essential if we are to reach net zero by 2050.”
Jo House, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Bristol and another lead author of the letter, expands on the biosphere point: “Many countries around the world have been planting trees and trying to improve the quality of their soils in order to absorb and store more carbon, which is really important. However, biological carbon storage is not permanent. We have especially seen this recently with all of the wildfires. This is why we need CO2 storage on a geological timescale, in the same way that carbon naturally locked underground is stored for millions of years.”
In 2024 the UK government committed nearly £22 billion of public funding over 25 years for CCS projects. Imposing a requirement to safely and securely dispose of CO2 by injecting it into the earth’s crust, otherwise known as a Carbon Takeback Obligation, would mean that more private funding would be available to kickstart the nascent CCS industry – and therefore, the cost to the taxpayer would decrease. Research co-published by CO2RE last year found that almost half the UK public believe that fossil fuel companies should be primarily responsible for paying for CDR.
The letter was led by Stephanie Loo, UK Director of the Carbon Balance Initiative. Along with Professor Samuel Krevor (Imperial) and Professor Pete Smith (Aberdeen), five CO2RE academics were lead authors of the letter: Professor Myles Allen (Oxford), Professor Paul Ekins (UCL), Professor Sam Fankhauser (Oxford), Professor Cameron Hepburn (Oxford) and Professor Jo House (Bristol). Multiple other CO2RE academics were signatories.
