UK weighs scrapping its largest untapped oilfield with crude over $100

Britain is deciding whether to drill its largest untapped oilfield in the middle of an oil shock, with Brent above 100 and more than 70% of its oil already coming from abroad. Rosebank, west of Shetland, is an £8.7 billion ($11.6 billion) development that its operator says would pump about 69,000 barrels a day at peak, roughly a tenth of the country’s expected oil output. The production vessel has been on site since June, and Ithaca Energy, which owns a fifth of the field, says it will likely stop investing in Britain if the government says no.

A major Cabinet split has emerged within Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government over whether to approve drilling at the Rosebank oilfield, with energy security on one side and climate commitments on the other.

Chancellor John Healey wants Rosebank approved for the jobs and the Treasury revenue, and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds is backing him. An unnamed minister told the Mail on Sunday that Burnham will ultimately back the development too. Unite and GMB, two of Britain’s largest unions, are pushing for approval.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh makes the call, and she is minded to say no. In 2022 she wrote that funding new fossil fuels was “irresponsible and shortsighted,” and that the world “can’t have any new oil or gas fields” if it wants to keep warming to 1.5C. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who blocked new licences when he held her job, is backing her.

Fahnbulleh approved Jackdaw on 21 October and has already explained why Rosebank is different. She calls Jackdaw “a gasfield that caters for the domestic market” and Rosebank “an oilfield that is mainly for export.” She also says the decision is hers alone under a quasi-judicial framework, and that bending it would invite a court to strike it down. Scotland’s Court of Session did exactly that in January 2025, quashing the first consents for both fields because their environmental assessments ignored the emissions from burning the oil and gas.

Rosebank lies about 80 miles northwest of Shetland in the North Atlantic. Rystad Energy estimates it holds nearly 500 million barrels of oil equivalent, about 90% of its oil, and Ithaca puts recoverable oil across two development phases at around 300 million barrels. Campaigners estimate that burning that oil would release more than 200 million tonnes of CO2, and government officials put the field’s emissions at roughly seven times Jackdaw’s.

Adura, the North Sea joint venture between Equinor and Shell Plc that operates Rosebank with an 80% stake, has deployed an electrification-ready Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel at the field. Adura says the field will produce oil at about 12 kg of CO2 per barrel, against a North Sea average of about 20 kg. Powering the vessel from shore could cut those emissions by more than 70%, to below 3 kg per barrel, once the technology is qualified and the consents are in place. The oil will be shipped by shuttle tanker to customers’ refineries in Europe.

North Sea production is in steep decline. The North Sea Transition Authority reported last week that UK proven and probable reserves fell to 2.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2025, down 0.4 billion in a year, and that not a single exploration well was drilled on the UK Continental Shelf in 2025.

Jackdaw, which is nearly complete, is expected to start supplying gas within weeks and could account for about 6% of North Sea gas production at full output. The government says approving it does not break Labour’s pledge against new exploration licences because Jackdaw holds an existing licence. The field had been held up by the legal challenge over downstream emissions.

Alongside the Jackdaw approval, Healey announced a £2 billion down payment for a new Energy Wealth Fund. Future North Sea oil and gas revenues will flow into it, and the capital is earmarked for renewable generation, low-carbon infrastructure and industries to replace the oil and gas economy. Treasury modelling found that had the UK invested its roughly £200 billion in North Sea receipts since the 1980s at returns similar to Norway’s, the fund could have reached about £1 trillion.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, officially the Government Pension Fund Global, is worth approximately $2.3 trillion, making it the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. It is financed primarily by surplus revenues from the Norwegian state’s petroleum sector, alongside returns from its global investments. Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, the fund posted a record profit of $184.3 billion in the first half of 2026, then lost $29.7 billion in the third quarter as rising borrowing costs cut the value of its bond portfolio.