The UK government has announced plans to allow a big expansion of drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea in a move that environmental activists have described as a taking a “wrecking ball” to the country’s climate commitments.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Monday that he hoped the plans would provide the UK with domestically-sourced energy while it transitions to a net zero economy by 2050.
“Even when we’ve reached net zero in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs will come from oil and gas. But there are those who would rather that it come from hostile states than from supplies we have here at home,” Sunak said in a statement.
He also announced plans to build two new carbon capture and storage sites in the North Sea, to be completed by 2030, which would take the country’s total to four.
Carbon capture facilities work at the source of the pollution by putting emissions into contact with a liquid solvent, which extracts the carbon dioxide in a process called chemical scrubbing.
That reduces the amount of carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere. The carbon can then be stored in products like cement, or buried deep underground.
The UK announcement comes despite evidence that the climate crisis is accelerating, and flies in the face of a previous warning from the International Energy Agency that there must be no new investment in oil and gas exploration if the world is to have any chance of restricting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.
Source: cnn.com
