THE Government is right to have allowed gas to be extracted from the Jackdaw reservoir about 150 miles east of Aberdeen.
It will not, unfortunately, lead to lower prices, but it will not lead to greater gas consumption in this country, and so our emissions should be unaffected.
In fact, if it will stop us importing liquefied natural gas from America – gas which needs to be chilled to -160C for shipment using lots of energy – it could reduce our overall emissions. It does seem crazy that the gas that is keeping domestic boilers going this winter comes all the way from Texas when it could come a shorter distance from Aberdeen.
It will help us become a little more self-reliant for energy. In 2025, 43 per cent of our energy was imported. We’ve already seen Donald Trump threaten to stop diesel exports so gas supplies from America are not guaranteed. More dangerously, 40 per cent of our gas comes from the 725-mile Langeled pipeline from Norway – and we all know how pipelines can mysteriously go wrong when there are Russian vessels in the area.
Plus the gas we import from Norway comes from the same Central North Sea field as Jackdaw gas comes from – again it seems crazy to get the same gas from Norway when it could come from UK production, with the companies and the well-paid workers paying taxes to our government rather than into the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund.
And if the British government really does ringfence those taxes in an investment fund for green energy projects, this decision to extract gas could help us transition away from using so much of it in the future – and that has to be our continued long term goal.
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