Licence to Drill: Why the Scottish Government needs to be clearer on fossil fuels

The first time Donald Trump entered the White House he immediately set to work dismantling the Obama administration’s climate-friendly energy initiatives. He swiftly erased environmental concerns from US energy policies and put in place an America First Energy Plan focused on using fossil fuel production to create jobs and cut energy costs.

Given his stance, it came as no surprise that, when he began his tilt at a second presidential term, Trump chose to reinvigorate a phrase first coined by former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele back in 2008. In a Fox News interview broadcast a few days before he won the Republican nomination in March last year, Trump said a government led by him would help the fossil-fuel industry “drill, baby, drill”, adding that there’s “no one better” at drilling and producing than Americans.

‘Drill, baby, drill’ was repeated by Trump ad nauseum throughout the election campaign and, having re-entered the White House last month, he has been as good as his word. Early executive orders have made clear that President Trump’s allegiance to the fossil fuel industry has not waned during his absence from frontline politics. A range of Biden-era climate policies have been ripped up and, just as he did during his first term, Trump has begun the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate deal.

“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump hammered home during his inaugural address. “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.”

While President Trump has vowed to deal with what he has termed a “national energy emergency” by bolstering “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal” at the expense of renewables, on this side of the Atlantic the UK and Scottish governments are attempting to do the opposite.

At the UK level, the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, written by energy security secretary Ed Miliband and Clean Power 2030 head Chris Stark and published at the end of last year, envisages cleaning up the country’s electricity system by 2030. Gas currently accounts for around a third of the UK’s energy-generation mix, but the aim is to see that proportion drastically reduce within the next five years by ramping up the speed at which renewables projects are built and connected to the grid. The aim is that by the end of the decade 95 per cent of the UK’s energy needs will come from clean sources.

North of the border, the Scottish Government may have scrapped its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030, but it has also vowed to pour its resources into the development of offshore wind. As part of that, finance secretary Shona Robison has pledged £150m in capital investment in the year ahead, stressing in her December budget announcement that the allocation represents a “significant strategic decision to invest in this nation’s green future”.

On the face of it, Trump’s actions are a gift to fossil fuel companies and a disaster for the climate. As Sam Sankar, senior vice-president for programmes at Earthjustice, says: “It’s striking that the emergency [Trump] seems to be declaring is one of a lack of fossil fuel production.” 

Yet while that would appear to be bad news in a global context, Stark says that, paradoxically, Trump’s actions could actually be of benefit to the UK’s clean energy plan. Speaking at Scottish Renewables’ Offshore Wind Conference, which was held in Glasgow last month, Stark noted  that Trump’s actions could drive investment in renewables out of the US and into the UK. 

Though Stark stressed that that “isn’t the way I would like to deal with this”, it is a development the UK and Scottish ministers will have to act quickly to capitalise on. Speaking at the same conference, Corio Generation chief executive Jonathan Cole noted that as developers typically spend between £200m and £300m before deciding whether to invest in a project, it is vital they see the UK as a positive place in which to do business. Charlie Jordan, chief executive at ScottishPower Renewables, agreed. “Companies are looking to decide where they’re going to spend their money and we need to make it as attractive as possible to invest in renewables so that we can get the growth,” he said. 

For its part, Stark said the UK Government is working at pace to ensure that the electricity generated by renewables projects can feed into the grid – something that is seen as a key block on the development of the offshore wind sector.  “None of this works without transmission, none of this works without the grid,” he said. 

Currently there are over 1,700 projects “gumming up the system” while waiting for connection approval, but under reforms being brought forward by electricity regulator Ofgem and the National Energy System Operator that queue is to be reordered on a priority basis. “If we do that, essentially we have all the projects that we need for 2030 and we’ll be bringing them in in the parts of the country where we need them,” Stark said.

The Scottish Government, meanwhile, hopes its £150m capital commitment, which is part of a £500m five-year package, will help stimulate the investment required to build out the renewables supply chain. It is beginning to make inroads. Last year, as part of the first tranche of the five-year fund, the Scottish Government, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise collectively provided £24.5m towards the £350m cost of a cable factory being developed by Sumitomo Electric UK Power Cables at the Port of Nigg. The factory is expected to supply ScotWind projects as and when they begin producing.

Similarly, in January the Scottish Government announced that the Scottish National Investment Bank had provided £20m to help subsea cable manufacturer XLCC develop a £1.4bn cable factory at Hunterston in Ayrshire. Billed as the “first in a series of strategic commercial investments in Scotland’s offshore wind supply chain”, the deal was hailed by acting net zero and energy secretary Gillian Martin as a “game-changing investment” that demonstrates “the way in which the Scottish Government is working in partnership with the public and private sectors to deliver jobs, business and further economic opportunities across the country”.

Questions remain about the effectiveness of both governments’ strategies. The clean energy plan is wholly dependent on planning and energy market reforms being completed in time to give developers the confidence they need in order to invest. The Scottish Government’s investment strategy, while welcomed by industry figures including Scottish Renewables chief executive Claire Mack and Offshore Wind Energy Council co-chair Brian McFarlane, has been branded a “drop in the ocean” by Professor John Underhill, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Energy Transition at the University of Aberdeen.

Even if the UK Government’s ambitious plan to clean up the electricity system by 2030 is achieved, the UK is still going to be reliant on fossil fuels for at least some of its energy needs for many years to come. Stark was clear at the Scottish Renewables conference that gas is expected to constitute a significantly smaller part of the energy mix from 2030 onwards, but that its contribution will not drop to zero. Yet both the UK and Scottish governments appear to have positioned themselves as being anti-fossil fuels, with the former pressing ahead with an extension to punitive windfall taxes on oil and gas company profits while also consulting on a ban on new exploration licences, and the latter remaining wedded to the presumption against exploration detailed in the draft Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan produced under then first minster Nicola Sturgeon in 2023.

It is not a stance that seems to sit well with the Scottish electorate. At one end of the political spectrum the Scottish Greens’ climate spokesman Mark Ruskell said recently that any new drilling would be “a betrayal of our planet and a terrible act of climate vandalism”. At the other end, Reform UK, which is making inroads in Scottish local politics and is expected to take a small number of seats at next year’s Holyrood election, has, in the words of Grantham Research Institute policy fellow Pallavi Sethi, a “peculiar obsession with climate change denial” to the extent it fully supports widescale drilling. But the majority view is much more nuanced. 

Indeed, according to a Survation poll carried out for advisory form True North, which represents a number of energy industry clients, more than two thirds of Scots are in favour of continuing to exploit North Sea oil and gas so long as it reduces the country’s reliance on energy imports. A majority of respondents – 53 per cent – said they were in favour of the UK Government’s clean energy by 2030 plan, while a greater proportion – 60 per cent – said they were in favour of new infrastructure, such as pylons, being built to support that. But voters remain sceptical about the government’s ability to achieve its clean energy plan, with just 35 per cent of respondents saying they believe the 2030 plan is achievable.

For True North senior energy adviser Allister Thomas, the poll “suggests it makes more sense to ramp up renewables while also pursuing policies to harness the UK’s oil and gas resources”, which, he says, “continue to play a crucial role in our energy mix, protecting jobs and mitigating imports in the meantime”.

Under First Minister John Swinney the SNP government, which is less beholden to the Greens since the Bute House Agreement ended last year, appears less hostile to fossil fuels than it did under Sturgeon. In his bid to build bridges with the business community, Swinney has said repeatedly that projects should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and that he wants to “work closely and carefully with the oil and gas sector to ensure its sustainability” as the transition to net zero progresses.

With just over a year until the Scottish electorate goes to the polls, and with the publication of its final energy strategy now significantly overdue, what that actually means remains unclear, though. Swinney was given the perfect chance to articulate it last month, when the Court of Session ruled that the Conservative government had been wrong to okay Rosebank and Jackdaw – developments in the North Atlantic and North Sea respectively – as the impact of burning the fossil fuels they might produce had not been assessed. 

Given the Supreme Court made a similar judgment last year – and given the current UK Government declined to defend the case – the ruling was widely expected, but other than calling it “very significant” Swinney refused to comment on what it would mean for the Scottish Government’s position on oil and gas. Asked whether the ruling meant it was time for him to finally get off the fence, he simply told journalists: “We need to now look at this court judgment and see what its implications are for the policy position of the Scottish Government.” 
With 2026 and 2030 both looming large, the time for making that policy position clear is long overdue.