Climate campaigners have urged a Scottish court to cancel the licence to drill the UK’s largest untapped oilfield, arguing it will cause “sizeable” and unjustified damage to the planet.
Greenpeace and Uplift accuse the former Conservative government of having unlawfully given the Norwegian oil giant Equinor a licence to exploit the Rosebank oilfield, which sits 80 miles (130km) north-west of Shetland and holds nearly 500m barrels of oil and gas.
Lawyers for both groups told a judge in Edinburgh on Tuesday the government and the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) formerly known as the Oil and Gas Authority, had wrongly failed to take into account the tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 that would be burned when the oil was used, and the impact that would have on the climate.
Ruth Crawford KC, the lawyer for Greenpeace, told Lord Ericht that Equinor and its Israeli-owned co-investor Ithaca knew it was unlawful to ignore the climate costs of the project.
“There can be no doubt this project will produce substantial amounts of oil and gas [with] a substantial impact on the climate and a substantial impact on environmental and human health,” she said.
Their judicial review, being heard in the court of session, Scotland’s top civil court, began as world leaders convened in Azerbaijan for a new round of climate talks, where Keir Starmer confirmed the UK had set a much tougher new target, to cut its carbon emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035.
Uplift and Greenpeace are asking the court to cancel the drilling licence for Rosebank and also a licence granted to a Shell subsidiary, BG International (BGI) to drill for gas in the Jackdaw field in the North Sea, which they also allege ministers granted unlawfully.
They estimate the Rosebank oilfield will release more CO2 than the annual emissions of the world’s 28 poorest countries combined, including Uganda and Mozambique.
They believe their challenges were given significant legal weight after the UK supreme court ruled in June that ministers had to take account of the climate impacts from burning the oil and gas extracted by drilling in the UK before issuing licences.
Even so, this case could prove to be a significant test of the new Labour government’s pledges to dramatically reduce the UK’s reliance on oil and gas by blocking new drilling licences. After Labour’s general election victory, Ed Miliband, the net zero secretary, decided the UK government would no longer defend the case brought by Greenpeace and Uplift but he still faces a political challenge if they win.
If Lord Ericht cancels their drilling licences, Equinor and BGI are likely to reapply for fresh licences to drill both fields, despite the supreme court decision, which followed a legal challenge by the climate campaigner Sarah Finch.
BGI is already extracting gas from the Jackdaw field. The companies argue both fields are essential to the UK economy, support thousands of jobs and provide significant tax revenues – arguments that critics of Labour’s climate policy are likely to endorse.
Crawford told the court that those political arguments were irrelevant in this case; this case was solely about whether the law was followed.
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She said ministers and the NSTA made the same “substantial error of law” identified by the supreme court in June when they licensed the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields without assessing the climate impacts of the oil and gas they produced.
She said Equinor, Ithaca and BGI had spent about £1bn on developing Rosebank and Jackdaw but had miscalculated. They knew it was unlawful to ignore the climate costs of the project, she said, adding: “They lost the bet.”
On Tuesday, before the case began, about 160 climate protesters gathered outside the court calling for the licences to be cancelled, chanting “I believe we can win,” while stretching a long red scarf across the entrance to the court.
Lauren MacDonald, a coordinator for the Stop Rosebank campaign, told activists on Monday night that winning this case would be crucial for the climate movement.
“As truly devastating as many things are in the world right now, in this little corner of the world, we are on the precipice of a massive, massive victory for the climate, and that is precisely because people have stood in the way,” she said.
“Every single fossil fuel project that we can stop, every single fraction is a degree of warming that we can stop. It’s countless lives saved, which will always, always be worth it.”