Rishi Sunak is talking bollocks about "maxing out" North Sea oil and gas

Under the current privatised energy set up drilling for more North Sea oil will neither improve energy security, nor bring down prices.

Whether you believe that soaring average global temperatures are caused by human activity, or you’re wilfully ignoring reality for some reason, what can’t seriously be disputed is that Rishi Sunak has been talking economically illiterate bollocks about the 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences he’s signing off on, whatever the environmental impact.

Energy Security

For as long as Britain’s energy market remains the ideologically deranged shambles of private corporations and overseas governments that it is, the idea of British “energy security” is an absolute fantasy.

It doesn’t matter how many new oil fields you open up if the companies extracting the fossil fuels are doing it for their own private profit.

The French have much more “energy security” than the UK because their national energy company EdF is owned and operated by the state.

When soaring energy prices threatened the French people and the French economy, the government imposed a 4% cap on how much EdF could raise prices.

Meanwhile in Britain, Rishi Sunak and the Tories allowed energy companies to triple household bills in less than two years, including EdF which owns and operates Britain’s fleet of nuclear power stations!

Instead of capping this profiteering like the French did, Sunak and the Tories used an astonishing £37 billion in public cash to artificially subsidise energy company profits via the Energy Price Guarantee.

The result of Sunak’s energy company subsidies has been a wave of unprecedented profits for energy companies.

British Gas increased their profits from £98 million for the first six months of 2022 to a whopping £969 million in the first six months of 2023!

Scottish Power raked in £556 billion in profits for the first six months of 2023; SSE profited to the tune of £2.18 billion for the year March 2022 - March 2023; Shell and BP recorded profits of £5 billion and £4 billion for the first three months of the year on their global operations.

And most incredibly the French state energy company EdF raked in a whopping £1.1 billion in UK profits in 2022, and £1.95 billion just for the first six months of 2023!

Sunak and the Tories allowing EdF to rake in obscene profits at the expense of the UK economy will certainly help the French state energy company to offset the cost of minimising energy price hikes for French businesses and citizens, won’t it?

Imagine the reality-reversed fantasy people must be living in to accept Sunak’s claim that Britain has any kind of “energy security” when the Tory government allows the French state energy company to bleed the British economy dry with vast price hikes, in order to offset the cost of keeping French energy prices low back home.

Not only does the UK have an unstable mix of private energy profiteers and foreign governments operating its energy sector, it’s got a radical right-wing government that deliberately prioritises protecting energy company profits over protecting the rest of the economy from obscene energy profiteering too.

Anyone who claims this ideologically deranged shambles represents “energy security” is either a blethering idiot or a malicious liar.

Lower prices

Sunak’s assertion that more North Sea drilling will result in lower energy prices is somehow even more divorced from reality than his deceptive rhetoric about “energy security”.

When energy prices started soaring in 2022 UK-based natural gas producers doubled their output, but this did absolutely nothing to stop the soaring prices because they maximised their profits by exporting it to the continent.

It doesn’t matter how much gas and oil gets taken from the North Sea if it’s being extracted by profit-seeking private companies that sell it at the international market rate.

Either Rishi Sunak is profoundly ignorant of how international energy markets work, and unaware that increased production is irrelevant when it’s his government that actually has the power to set the energy prices that British homes and businesses end up paying, or he knows it perfectly well, and he’s deliberately trying to dupe the hopelessly gullible into believing the outright lie that they’ll personally benefit from increased North Sea extraction.

Transportation footprints

In talking up the significance of the energy footprint of importing and processing fossil fuels from overseas Rishi Sunak is being deliberately misleading.

Yes, it’s arguable that imported Liquid Natural Gas could have a higher transportation and processing footprint than North Sea gas (depending on the significant and varying amounts of energy required to extract it from the different North Sea gas fields), but in reality it’s stark-staringly obvious that the energy requirements of processing it and moving it around amount to only a tiny percentage of the carbon footprint of actually burning the stuff to generate energy.

A far less misleading comparison would be to judge the carbon footprint of extracting, transporting, processing, and burning new North Sea fossil fuel reserves against the carbon footprint of investing in renewable energy generation like wind, solar, hydroelectric, wave, and geothermal.

Sunak clearly doesn’t want to make this kind of comparison though, because it would be profoundly unfavourable to his lunatic agenda of “maxing out” the North Sea oil and gas reserves, wouldn’t it?

Summary

Rishi Sunak is talking a load of absolute bollocks, aimed squarely at the uninformed and the gullible.

His soothing rhetoric about “energy security” is totally misleading bollocks.

His claims that increased North Sea production would result in falling prices is economically illiterate bollocks.

And his talking up of transportation and processing costs for imported fossil fuels is deliberately deceptive and evasive bollocks.

Just don’t believe a word of it.