Energy Security Strategy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I cannot comment on leaks of draft documents to journalists. All government documents go through a long drafting process. As I said, we are supportive of the deployment of onshore wind, but we want to do it in co-operation with and with the agreement of local communities, so we will seek to roll out a number of partnerships to enable us to do that.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my energy interests. It is a bit difficult to comment on a paper we have not seen, but by the sound of it, it is going to be full of admirable longer-term proposals, including the nuclear one—although I think that actually, as usual, they are going to get that wrong. Generally, it is in the right direction, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has rightly emphasised. But is there a recognition of the unavoidable fact that, for the next five to eight years, we are going to remain inextricably embedded in dangerous and volatile global oil and gas markets, and we cannot get out of this? There is only one short-term answer, which is to cut demand—as again the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, have suggested—and increase supply substantially. What are we doing to get Middle East suppliers, who are supposed to be our friends, to replace Russian exports—which are of course financing Russian atrocities by the day—by pumping much more oil and gas in the short term, which they can easily do? When are we going to get on with that?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord is right: we will have an ongoing requirement for oil and gas in the transition period. We will seek to obtain as much of that as possible from our own domestic sources and will roll out an additional licensing round for North Sea oil and gas projects this autumn—they will of course all be done in co-operation with our climate compatibility tests—because it is much better to get those resources locally than source from unstable parts of the world. I cannot comment on discussions that have taken place with various regimes in the Middle East.