The petition of residents of the constituency of Macclesfield.
Declares that all new coal, oil and gas extraction projects in the UK should be ruled out.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to rule out all new coal, oil and gas extraction projects in the UK.
And the petitioners remain, etc. —[Presented by David Rutley, Official Report, 23 January 2023; Vol. 726, c. 10P.]
[P002798]
Observations from The Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero (Graham Stuart):
Putin’s weaponisation of energy has shown how we need to be less reliant on imported fossil fuels. The new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s mission is to replace them with cheap, clean, secure British energy sources. We will be increasingly powered by renewables including wind and solar, hydrogen, power with carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) and new nuclear plants.
Our recently announced plan, Powering Up Britain, is another significant step forward. It outlines how the Government plan to secure our energy system by ensuring a resilient and reliable supply, increase our energy efficiency, and bring bills down through decisive actions to increase Britain’s low carbon domestic electricity supply. It reduces our reliance on fossil fuels for heating and transport. It continues UK leadership in securing the economic benefits of the energy transition, including through major investment in CCUS.
At the centre of our coal policy is our commitment to phase out coal from our electricity generation by 2024. Coal’s share of our electricity supply has already declined from almost 40% in 2012 to around 2% in 2021.
Although coal will soon no longer be part of our electricity system, there may continue to be demand for coal in industries such as steel and cement and for heritage railways. The current licensing arrangements leave room for domestic demand to be met through our own resources.
Oil and natural gas are an essential resource as we transition to net zero. We need a more nuanced view of oil and gas. We cannot simply stop using them overnight, as the independent Climate Change Committee has recognised. Even when we meet our net zero targets in 2050, we will still be using a quarter of the gas we currently use now, and we will still need oil for manufacturing essential products such as plastics, medicines and fertiliser.
The Government’s landmark North Sea Transition Deal is putting the sector on a path to deliver a net zero basin by 2050. The Government are also supporting carbon capture technologies to ensure that the continued use of these important transition fuels that underpin our secure energy system will be as low-carbon as possible. These actions are helping to ensure that we meet our 2050 net zero target and play our part in limiting global temperature rises to 1.5°, as mandated by the Paris Agreement and Glasgow Climate Pact.
The natural decline of many of the UK’s offshore fields means that the UK is likely to remain a net importer of both oil and gas; a faster decline in domestic production would mean importing more oil and gas. The production of natural gas from the UK continental shelf creates less than half as much greenhouse gas as imported liquefied natural gas; so curbing UK gas production would likely lead to an increase in carbon emissions rather than the reverse.