Gazprom Energy

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness posits those as two alternatives but in fact we are doing both. We will still need gas supplies during the transition, but we are spending some £6.6 billion over this Parliament on home insulation measures, and we have one of the largest programmes of renewables in the western world and one of the largest offshore wind sectors in the world. We are proposing to expand that to approximately 40 gigawatts by the end of this decade. None of this can happen quickly—it is a transition—but we will still need gas during that transition. My point is that it is better to get the gas that we will need during the transition from UK sources rather than relying on unstable parts of the world.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, following on from the noble Baroness’s question, which focused on domestic use of gas, I note that in August 2021, the Swedish firm HYBRIT made the first delivery of steel produced through green methods, without coal and without gas energy supplies. I note that Sheffield Forgemasters, for example, is a Gazprom client, and indeed, two-thirds of the energy supply for the Energy Intensive Users Group comes from Gazprom. Should not the Government be doing far more to help energy-intensive industries get away from fossil fuels?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We are—that is the answer to the noble Baroness’s question. We have the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund, and we are working with many of these difficult-to-decarbonise industries, such as steel, which of course plays a vital role in many of our deprived communities. We want to help them transition to clean forms of production such as hydrogen, so we are. I add that, even if gas is supplied by Gazprom UK, it is not Russian gas. Gazprom buys gas on the wholesale gas markets here, as many other retail suppliers do. We are dependent only by about 3% to 4% on gas supplies from Russia.