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.

Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Grand Committee

I will address Amendment 10 very briefly, because I am looking forward to hearing the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, introduce it fully. It would prevent further licensing in marine protected areas, and I offer it my support, as it fits well with Amendment 9 on spatial prioritisation, which I am putting forward.

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, very much. I will speak on the marine amendments in this group—Amendment 10 in my name and Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Lord. I also support the other amendments in this group.

Amendment 10 is really very simple: it would stop licensing in our marine protected areas. As I stated at Second Reading, these areas have been designated for protection and enhancement in order to conserve the critical species, habitats and ecosystems that they contain. Their protection is critical for many reasons, not least because we have signed up to this in both UK and international law. We now have 377 marine protected areas, which account for 38% of our seas.

In order to be included in the 2030 target—to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030—the Government’s own suggested criteria are that these MPAs need to have long-term protection and/or management in place that works against adverse pressures on biodiversity objectives. However, the interpretation of what constitutes adverse pressure on these MPAs is where there is the most disagreement, even between government departments, a point that is highly relevant to this Bill. Currently, there is nothing in the licensing process to prevent the North Sea Transition Authority from offering up licences in marine protected areas. Indeed, licences are currently being granted in marine protected areas: in the most recent licensing round, 22% of the licences granted were in such areas.

Is oil drilling in an MPA a problem? Well, it makes a huge difference. As I mentioned at Second Reading, the evidence suggests that it can have a large and irreversible impact. However, when asked about this, the Government have said, in various responses to the Parliamentary Questions looking at the impact, that the OPL Bill will not affect the UK’s ability to reach the targets for ensuring that marine protected areas are in a good or recovering state and that the licences will only ever have been awarded once the environmental regulator is satisfied that the activities would not negatively impact protected areas. This was reiterated by the Minister at Second Reading, when he stated:

“We already have a robust regulatory framework in place to ensure that marine protected areas are effectively protected. Licences will be awarded only after ensuring that the environmental regulator OPRED is satisfied that activities will not have negative effects on those important protected areas”.—[Official Report, 26/3/24; col. 657.]


However, that overstates the case. The more I have looked into the processes for assessment of the environmental impact of oil drilling on MPAs, the more convinced I have become that we simply do not have in place a system that is fit for purpose, certainly not to protect these marine protected areas.

This is because the process and the responsibility for environmental regulation currently sits with OPRED, which is part of DESNZ and is advised by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, but there is a very complicated and convoluted process and path by which the expert advice from the JNCC reaches the Minister. First, as a statutory consultee, the JNCC’s advice must be considered when OPRED produces an environmental assessment, but OPRED is under no duty to follow the JNCC’s advice, which is also not published. Then, in an instance where OPRED advises the Secretary of State not to issue a licence, the Secretary of State can disregard it if they believe that there is an overriding public interest.

A secondary problem is that the assessments do not consider cumulative impacts in a robust way. For example, OPRED will look at a pipeline and say, “Well, a pipeline in the grand area of an MPA is a tiny footprint”, but of course it is not just the pipeline that we are looking at. The cumulative effects of all the different things going on will have, and has been shown to have, a significant impact on the MPA.

The third and final problem is that OPRED assessments often have a tendency to assume that, if there is no scientific evidence, there is no problem, instead of adopting the precautionary principle. In fact, irrespective of what the environmental assessments from the JNCC say, OPRED and the Secretary of State can decide to grant licences to MPAs anyway. Looking at the evidence base, we can see that that is exactly what is happening. For example, in the past three years, the JNCC has objected to 54 development applications in MPAs from the oil and gas industry, yet not a single one of those applications has been turned down. In fact, I did a trawl over the past 17 years—since 2007, when the first MPAs came into place—and could not find a single licence that had been turned down on an environmental basis. That would suggest that the environmental assessment system in this case is not working.

What I find most concerning is that the JNCC has expressed its concerns. For example, in a letter to DESNZ on the recent 33rd oil and gas licensing round, the JNCC wrote a strong letter stating that it was unable to agree with the conclusions that the projects would have no adverse impact on site integrity. The committee strongly advised that no new oil and gas infrastructures should be located anywhere within an MPA. It also pointed out that the Government’s approach to licensing oil and gas activities was inconsistent with the approach taken with other industries—for example, wind farms. Those three statements are extremely concerning. Our Joint Nature Conservancy Committee is making strong statements about these issues and yet, somewhere along the line, this is not being taken into account. Remember that no licences have been turned down, as far as I can see, based on environmental impact.

This process does not seem to be working and will result, and is resulting, in damage to the MPAs, which the Government have heralded. I join them in that, given that we now have marine protected areas in the oceans around the UK. Therefore, the onus is on the Government to show how increased licensing in the MPAs, as part of this OPL Bill, will not cause harm and to publish the evidence base that supports this. They also need to outline in detail exactly how these harms, once they are caused, will be mitigated while still meeting our 2030, now 2040, targets, which we and Defra are very much holding everyone’s feet to the fire on. If the Government cannot do this, the solution surely must be to put this amendment into the Bill.

I also want briefly to turn to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, to which I have happily added my name. We need both these amendments. Without a proper seabed plan and a land use strategy for the sea—I wish that the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, were here—MPAs will not live up to their name. We know that we require multiple resources from the oceans around us. However, we need to be able to plan those in tandem, rather than in a somewhat random approach, where one thing is trumping the other—and trumping it sometimes through financial gain without properly considering the other requirements. Until we have a spatial prioritisation plan in place, we should not be granting any licences. We need to know what we want to take from where and how we ensure that the best use is made of the precious resource that we have around us. Until the Government come up with this spatial plan, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Randall, mentioned, they promised a while ago, we should not go forward with any of these licensing rounds.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support in particular Amendments 9 and 10, so ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I have quite a lot of experience of marine protected areas in the south-west and the Isles of Scilly. I recall having a useful discussion with the Environment Agency, English Nature and others about how one applies an MPA to a group of islands and whether one would be allowed to run any type of ship across them. The answer was, “Not really”. I said, “Well, who is going to enforce these regulations?” The answer was the Navy. That was even more interesting, because I asked, “Who is the most likely culprit?” They said that the most likely culprits around Scilly were people in kayaks. If one is trying to merge our latest aircraft carrier with people in kayaks, there is work to be done.