Donald Trump’s latest attack on renewables has reignited calls to drill the North Sea for oil – despite research showing it won’t lower ener
...lower energy bills. Donald Trump has unleashed his latest attack on renewables, branding the UK “crazy” for not boosting oil extraction in the North Sea. The British government ended exploration licences last year, meaning companies can no longer get permission to search for new oil and gas reserves in untapped areas. This doesn’t mean that all current drilling projects have stopped. However, as Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz – one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel chokepoints that carries around one fifth of global oil supplies – continues, calls to U-turn on the historic ban have gotten louder. Chancellor Rachel Reeves says the government is working “intensely” to allow further drilling by opening up “tie-back sites”, which permit drilling on or near existing fields. It comes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that the war on Iran will hit the UK hardest of all the world’s advanced economies due to how much energy it imports. Trump tells UK to ‘drill baby drill’ Europe is desperate for energy, and yet the United Kingdom refuses to open North Sea Oil, one of the greatest fields in the world,” Trump wrote earlier this week on his social media platform Truth Social. “Aberdeen should be booming. Norway sells its North Sea Oil to the UK at double the price. They are making a fortune.” Trump went on to argue that the UK is “better situated” for North Sea drilling, adding: “Drill, baby drill! It’s absolutely crazy that they [the UK] don’t, and no more windmills!” What Donald Trump gets wrong about the North Sea The UK has already extracted around 4.1 billion tonnes of oil since 1975, with the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) projecting a further 218 million tonnes will be collected by 2050 from existing fields. According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), these projections suggest that new drilling could only yield a further 74 million tonnes, equivalent to 1.7 per cent of the total that could be extracted from 1975 to 2050. This means that 93 per cent of the oil and gas that is likely to be produced from the North Sea has already been extracted. A separate analysis from campaign group Uplift found that opening major new fields in the North Sea would make almost no difference to the UK’s reliance on gas imports.
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