Displaying items by tag: Rosebank oil field

The UK's largest untapped oil field has been approved for development by regulators. It is estimated that Rosebank, 80 miles west of Shetland, could produce 300 million barrels of oil - but opponents say those could account for 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. The lead company Equinor puts the capacity at about 70,000 barrels per day, which the BBC calculates would be about 10% of the UK’s current daily production. At that rate it would take about twelve years to extract the recoverable oil, although other groups have made higher estimates of the amount that could be found. The Government has welcomed the decision, saying it will raise billions of pounds and ‘make us more secure against tyrants like Putin’. Rishi Sunak said, ‘As we make the transition to renewables, we will still need oil and gas: it makes sense to use our own’. But Scotland's first minister Humza Yousaf said he was ‘disappointed’, while the Green Party called the decision ‘morally obscene’.