Why Trump is wrong on North Sea oil and gas

Donald Trump will arrive in Scotland this week (Friday 25th – Tuesday 29th July) to visit his golf courses and meet with Keir Starmer in Aberdeen. It is anticipated that the US President will use the meeting to criticise UK energy policy and repeat his call to "get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil".

This briefing examines claims by Trump (and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK) about the North Sea and outlines why more drilling is not in the UK’s national interest.

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In Brief

• Trump’s claims that the North Sea can provide the UK with a secure energy supply run counter to reality. After 50 years of drilling, the UK has burned through most of its gas.
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• Trump’s claims that new drilling will cut UK energy costs and revive Aberdeen, ‘the oil capital of Europe’, are false. New drilling will not lower bills or save jobs. 
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• New drilling is not in the UK’s national interest, and is incompatible with the UK’s climate commitments and the international goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C.‍

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‍Trump at odds with UK energy policy

For months, Trump has attacked the UK’s shift to renewables, criticising the building of offshore wind capacity in particular, and urging more North Sea drilling. The UK was “making a very big mistake” he said in January, later claiming there’s “a century of drilling left” in the North Sea and demanding just last week that the UK “bring back the oil.”

Where Trump goes, Nigel Farage follows. Reform UK has similarly slammed the UK government’s commitment to ending new oil and gas licensing, as well as the decision to raise the levy on oil and gas profits.  Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, last week warned renewable energy firms that a Reform government would scrap clean energy subsidies, and Nigel Farage has declared that the UK should be “self-sufficient in gas”.  ‍

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Calls for more drilling are not grounded in reality

Far from there being ‘a century of drilling left’, as Trump has claimed, the North Sea is a hyper-mature basin with just a small fraction of UK gas reserves remaining after 60 years of drilling. By 2027, UK gas production will fall below the amount needed just to heat our homes, which currently accounts for 38% of UK gas use.¹

According to official projections – even if new North Sea fields are developed – the UK’s reliance on imported gas is set to rise from 55% today to 68% dependent by 2030, 85% by 2040, and 94% dependent on gas imports by 2050.²
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Opening new oil and gas fields makes almost no difference to UK dependency on gas imports. Jackdaw, one of the biggest undeveloped gas fields, if approved, would reduce our annual gas import dependency by just 2% on average; and the controversial Rosebank field, whose reserves are primarily oil destined for export, has the potential to reduce annual gas import dependency by just 1% on average. If no new fields were developed, the UK would be 97% dependent on gas imports by 2050 – just fractionally higher than with new drilling.²

Issuing new exploration licenses would also have almost no impact on the amount of gas we will need to import to meet our needs. New exploration licences could reduce gas import dependency in any given year by just 1-2%, according to the regulator’s projections, meaning that it would still soar to 83% in 2040 and 92% in 2050, even if Labour U-turned on its plan to ban new licences.²

In short, even if the UK were to ‘drill baby drill’ and double down on oil and gas extraction, as Trump and Farage would like us to – at a cost of billions – the UK would be almost completely reliant on imported gas to meet our needs in just 25 years time.  

The idea that new drilling – whether through more licensing or new field developments – will alter this trajectory runs counter to reality. That’s a geological fact, not a political choice.

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More drilling will not lower bills or save jobs

Trump has claimed that more drilling will lead to lower energy bills: “UK’s energy costs would go WAY DOWN, and fast,” he says. This is false. 

More domestic oil and gas production makes no difference to UK energy bills. North Sea reserves are owned by oil and gas companies who sell them to the highest bidder at international market prices – and anyway most of what is produced is oil, 80% of which the UK exports. North Sea production is too small to influence these prices. The UK’s experience after Russia invaded Ukraine, which led to soaring gas prices and a cost of living crisis with millions of British households struggling to stay warm, underlines the urgent need for the UK to get off gas through homegrown renewable energy. 

Continuing to focus on new drilling over renewables distracts from the urgent work needed to create good, clean energy jobs to replace those being lost in oil and gas, as the North Sea declines. The number of jobs supported by the oil and gas sector has more than halved in the past decade – from 441,000 jobs in 2013 to just 213,000 jobs in 2023, according to industry data – despite new field approvals and hundreds of new licenses being issued. Even the enormous Rosebank oil field, the UK’s biggest undeveloped oil field, if approved, would support just 255 direct and 137 supply chain jobs in the UK on average over the lifetime of the field, according to its developer Equinor.  

Aberdeen, which Trump referred to as the “oil capital of Europe”, has had a ‘disastrous decade’, seeing a steep fall in incomes alongside rising levels of fuel poverty and emergency food bank use. It is now predicted by EY to have the least economic growth of any UK city in the next three years.

The best way to protect UK energy workers and their communities is to create good, renewable energy jobs and support people into these industries with a long-term future.‍

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‍New drilling is incompatible with UK climate commitments

Trump is dismantling many of the US policies designed to address climate change, including withdrawing from the Paris Agreement for the second time. The UK government, by contrast, has reaffirmed its commitment to meeting these targets, with the Prime Minister saying he will go “all out” for a low-carbon future and accelerate the push to net zero. 

‍There is now overwhelming scientific evidence that there is no room for new oil and gas projects if we are to stay within safe climate thresholds. A recent University College London study found that emissions from burning global reserves in existing and planned oil and gas fields would exceed – by a long way – the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C. As such, it concluded that opening any new North Sea oil and gas fields is inconsistent with achieving the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. 

The proposed Rosebank field, the UK’s largest undeveloped oil field off the coast of Shetland, would – if approved – create more CO2 than the 700 million people living in the world’s poorest countries produce in a year. Its owner, Equinor, which is majority-owned by the Norwegian government, is expected to reapply imminently for drilling permission after its initial approval, granted by the previous government, was ruled unlawful in January by the Scottish Court of Session for not taking into account the impact it will have on the climate. 

This time around, the full climate impacts of Rosebank will be counted, at which point it will be clear that Rosebank is not consistent with the UK’s climate commitment to achieving the international goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C. 

Millions of people around the world are already struggling to cope with extreme weather, including in the UK, which has just experienced its driest spring in over a century and the hottest June on record. Scotland has just seen its biggest wildfires on record, with the number of fires tripling this year, and UK farmers are warning that extreme weather is now impacting their ability to feed the nation.

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‍New drilling: good for oil and gas firms but not the UK national interest

Trump’s calls for more North Sea oil and gas drilling – repeated by Nigel Farage and Reform UK – have nothing to do with lowering bills or providing the UK with a secure and affordable supply of energy. They are about boosting the profits of oil and gas companies.

‍Both Trump and Reform UK have sought and, in the case of Trump, received millions of dollars from oil and gas interests to finance their political ambitions. 

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Methodology 

1. The CCC’s Seventh Carbon Budget provides estimates of residential gas demand under the Balanced Net Zero Pathway. The NSTA’s Production Projections (March 2025) provide estimates for the amounts that are expected to be produced from the UKCS through to 2050. These data show that by 2027, the UK will no longer produce enough gas domestically to meet residential gas demand. If action is not taken to decarbonise in line with the CCC’s BNZP, then the CCC’s Seventh Carbon Budget baseline scenario estimates for residential gas demand suggest that this inflection point will take place in 2026, instead of 2027. 
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2. ‍NSTA’s Production Projections (March 2025) were used to estimate gas import dependency in the UK through to 2050. 
   
   On an annual basis, the amounts of gas expected to be produced within already producing or sanctioned UKCS fields were compared against the amounts of gas required to meet UK demand under the Climate Change Committee's Balanced Net Zero Pathway (as published within the NSTA's projections). 
   
   This established what proportion of UK gas demand could be met by UKCS gas production without the development of new projects, with the remainder needing to be met by gas imports - thus providing a baseline estimate of UK gas import dependency. 
   
   To estimate how import dependency could change with the development of new North Sea fields, gas import dependency was recalculated accounting for the NSTA’s production projections for gas with the development of undeveloped discoveries. 
   
   To analyse the potential impacts of the Rosebank and Jackdaw projects, gas import dependency was recalculated accounting for the annual gas production estimates published in the Rosebank and Jackdaw Environmental Statements. 

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Notes:

• This analysis assumes that all gas produced in the UK is used domestically, as estimates for the exportation rates of gas produced in the UKCS are unavailable. However, there is no guarantee that gas produced from UK fields will be used within the UK, and so this is likely to overestimate the amount of gas that will be used to meet UK demand.
  

• As such, this analysis provides the most optimistic estimates of UK gas import dependency. In reality, gas import dependency levels will likely be higher.

• Production estimates from the Rosebank and Jackdaw Environment Statements provide the highest range of gas expected to be produced from these fields, which are necessary to assess the worst case environmental impacts. 

• However, the mid case production profiles, which provide the most likely range for production from these fields, are lower. For example, the high case production profile for Rosebank is 500 million barrels of oil equivalent, whereas the midcase is 350 million barrels of oil equivalent. As such, the impacts of the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields on UK gas import dependency will be overstated.

• Due to the overturning of the development consents for Rosebank and Jackdaw, both fields are running behind schedule. As the analysis is based on estimates from the Environmental Statements, the timelines will not exactly match the production profiles of the fields once accounting for these delays. However, these are the only publicly available estimates that are disaggregated by year.