Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 26th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, many have already commented on the apparent disconnect between the OPL Bill and the UK’s net-zero ambitions. Although I support and share these concerns, I would like to focus on a different aspect of the Bill, alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Young: the impact of increased offshore licensing on our marine protected areas.

I start with the good news. In the past few years, the UK Government have made good strides to protect critically important areas in the ocean by designating them as marine protected areas. There are now 377 of these, covering 38% of the UK’s seas. These are designated to protect and enhance specific species, habitats and ecosystems. We are rightly proud of them, and they have now been included in our target of protecting 30% of our seas for nature by 2030—the international commitment that the Government signed up to at COP 15 in December 2022.

However, to be included in this target, the Government’s own suggested criteria are to

“have long-term protection and/or management in place that works against adverse pressures on the area’s biodiversity objectives, or actively results in improved outcomes for biodiversity”.

This is all good, until we come to the Bill, which makes no mention of not allowing production licences in MPAs. In many ways, this is a classic case of a Bill from one department not aligning with the aims, aspirations and even policies of another—in this case, Defra. The Bill could in fact dramatically reverse progress towards meeting the 30% target, since there is nothing to prevent the North Sea Transition Authority offering up and licensing multiple oil and gas exploration licences in MPAs. It is depressing to look at the licences granted since October 2023: of the 27 granted, six were in marine protected areas. These are some of our most critically endangered sea habitats in the UK.

Does this matter? Is the footprint of new drilling wells on MPAs and nature just too small to worry about? Is it just dolphins, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, commented? I hope, in the next couple of minutes, to convince your Lordships otherwise, and to demonstrate that, in many ways, deep-sea oil and gas production is possibly more damaging to the environment than bottom trawling, because it affects all parts of the ecosystem that species use to navigate, reproduce, feed and even breathe.

We can be under no illusion that these impacts are major, and that each stage of oil and gas production causes damage. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned that, in the exploration stage—before a single drop of oil or molecule of gas has been extracted—surveys must be done to see the geological structure of the seabed, and this uses seismic airgun surveys. These surveys emit an ear-splitting noise that is 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine—imagine that. These blasts deafen the highly sensitive hearing systems of marine mammals that rely on echolocation to navigate the sea, including sperm, minke and long-finned pilot whales, as well as orca and Atlantic white-sided dolphins —animals that we celebrate whenever we see Attenborough on television, thinking what a fantastic environment we have in our seas and on our shores. If the Bill passes without these MPA safeguards in place, we will see changes in migration patterns, fatal deformities in these marine animals, and even death and further loss of these iconic species.

The next stage is the exploratory and appraisal stage, where extensive physical damage is caused to habitats and the seabed. To go back to the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, this will smother and damage critical habitats—for example, for deep-sea sponges and our very rare cold-water corals. It is not just these organisms that are being lost but the critical ecosystem services that they provide, particularly in carbon sequestration. These are also important nesting habitats for commercial fish stocks, so this starts to damage our economic viability for commercial fishing.

Finally—another point picked up by the noble Baroness, Lady Young—there is the damage from oil spills. It is not the large oil spills that we sometimes see, which thankfully are rare; the vast majority come from a process called produced water, which is extracted from the deposits in the production process and contains soluble and non-soluble oil and various chemicals. All these small processes join together to create big slicks of oil—last year, a couple were noted that were up to 12 to 14 kilometres long. A study by an international body overseeing the protection of offshore activities in the north-east Atlantic showed that this produced water accounts for between 95% and 99% of oil discharges. This is killing our seabirds and significantly impacting life changes. This will happen when we have drilling going on, but my argument is this: please can we not have it happening in our marine protected areas.

If that is not enough, there are two further impacts: toxic chemicals and microplastic waste. We have seen many examples of them and we know the impacts.

In summary, if the Bill is allowed to proceed in its current form, without stopping new oil and gas licences in MPAs, it will be a serious obstacle to achieving the Government’s agreed environmental targets. I do not see how we can protect 30% of our marine environments by 2030 and achieve the Environment Act target that 70% of designated features in MPAs should in a favourable condition by 2042 while we continue to drill in these marine protected areas and cause huge amounts of damage to these critically important environments.

I urge the Government to remove the North Sea Transition Authority’s ability to grant new oil and gas licences within MPAs. This could be achieved by a simple amendment to Clause 1, prohibiting the NSTA inviting any applications for oil and gas exploration and extraction activities in any of the 377 marine protected areas in UK seas. I intend to explore this proposal further in Committee.