Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill
This evening, January 8, MPs where due to debate and vote on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, to explain a little about the Bill I've produced this short video.
When I have the opportunity to, I’ll be backing the Bill, it’s the right thing for the environment and it’s the right thing for Britain.
You can read the transcript of my video below:
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"...This evening we’ll be debating an voting on an important piece of legislation, the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill.
This Bill will ensure ensure that the oil and gas regulator runs annual applications for new North Sea oil and gas exploration.
In other words it will make sure that our own UK reserves of oil and gas continue to be found and brought out of the ground and used.
Some people are asking, Why is this a good thing? we’re supposed to be moving away from relying on fossil fuels?
Well Yes we are, and the UK has made remarkable progress in this.
Just 30 years ago, the vast majority of our energy came from coal oil and gas.
Now over half of our energy comes from renewable sources like wind.
That’s a huge transition in a very short time.
In fact UK recently became first country in the G20 to halve its carbon emissions. We are quite literally leading the world in this.
But natural Gas still makes up about 40% of our energy mix and we will need gas for some time to come.
Renewables like wind and solar are great but we need back-up for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
So we have three options.
The first option is to just to stop using gas.
Think about this - the economy and our lives as we know them would collapse. Do you want to switch your lights on, heat your house? Do you want to charge your phone? Do you want trains to run and factories to work?
There is one reason prosperity has increased so much since industrial revolution - and that’s cheap and plentiful energy.
The alternative to cheap and plentiful energy is a pre industrial economy - where we’re cold poor and living in dark for half the year.
Extremist environmentalists might advocate for this but I suspect they’re in the minority.
So the second option is to import more and more gas from other countries.
But this is bad financially - it costs us to purchase supplies from abroad. It’s bad for energy security - relying on other nations that may or may not be good to trade with, for example Russia, And it has a far more harmful impact on the environment. In fact imported LPG is 4 times more carbon intensive than UK produced.
Or the third option is to produce our own oil and gas.
This means we can guarantee energy security, money made from taxing producers can make the UK richer by funding public services, grow the number of jobs in the energy sector and we can reduce overall emissions because our oil and gas are cleaner.
This Bill today will ensure that happens. other political parties oppose it but this doesn’t make logical sense. If you are in favour of reducing emissions and you don’t want the lights to go out, then we need to use our own natural resources as we move to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
So I’ll be backing the Bill, it’s the right thing for the environment and it’s the right thing for Britain."
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Benefits of the Bill
The government has stated that the Bill aims to achieve the following:
- Make the UK more energy independent and safeguard domestic energy supplies by increasing investor and industry confidence.
- Enhance the UK’s energy security and reduce dependence on higher emission imports from overseas.
- Protect the domestic oil and gas industry that supports more than 200,000 jobs in the UK, adding £16 billion annually to the economy - with fossil fuel producers expected to pay around £50 billion in tax over the next 5 years.
- Realise the UK’s net zero target in a pragmatic, proportionate and realistic way; without unduly burdening families and businesses.
