Kemi Badenoch vows Tories will 'get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea'

The Conservative Party will make "maximising extraction" its goal if it wins power, rather than measures aimed at shifting the North Sea industry away from fossil fuels.

Mrs Badenoch will use a speech in Aberdeen in the coming days to set out her plans, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

She will announce that the Tories plan to completely overhaul the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which oversees the issuing of licences, dropping the word transition and replacing its current 12-page mandate with a simple order to extract the maximum possible amount of fossil fuels.

Mrs Badenoch said Britain "cannot afford not to be doing everything to get hydrocarbons out the ground" to boost growth.

She said: "We are in the absurd situation where our country is leaving vital resources untapped while neighbours such as Norway extract them from the same seabed.

"Britain has already decarbonised more than every other major economy since 1990, yet we face some of the highest energy prices in the developed world.

"This is not sustainable and it cannot continue. That is why I am calling time on this unilateral act of economic disarmament and Labour's impossible ideology of net zero by 2050.

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"So, a future Conservative government will scrap all mandates for the North Sea beyond maximising extraction.

"It is time that common sense, economic growth and our national interest came first, and only the Conservatives will deliver that.

"We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea."

It comes after the Government published new guidance last month on how the environmental impacts of oil and gas are included in assessments.

As a result, offshore developers can submit applications for consent to extract fossil fuels in oil and gas fields that are already licensed, which includes the Rosebank gas field in the north sea.

A DESNZ spokesperson told LBC: “We are already delivering a fair and orderly transition in the North Sea to drive growth and secure skilled jobs for future generations, with the biggest ever investment in offshore wind and three first of a kind carbon capture and storage clusters.

“We are committed to delivering the manifesto commitment to not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis.”

Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled that emissions created by burning fossil fuels should be considered when granting planning permission for new drilling sites, in a case that focused on an oil well in Surrey but reverberated through the energy sector.

A challenge brought by environmental campaigners in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, over approval for Rosebank and Jackdaw, was upheld at the Court of Session in Edinburgh in January.

Greenpeace and Uplift argued the UK Government and North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) had acted unlawfully when granting consent to the projects, as environmental impact assessments did not take into account downstream emissions resulting from the burning of the extracted fuels.

An open letter, co-ordinated by Earth Percent and backed by the Stop Rosebank campaign, was signed by artists including Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway of Radiohead, rock band Enter Shikari, Imogen Heap, and Olly Alexander of Years & Years.

The signatories claim the expansion of operations at Rosebank will accelerate the climate crisis, deliver no meaningful benefit to the UK public, and burden future generations.