The numbers don’t look great if you squint. But Jackdaw says don’t.
Adura, the owner of that controversial North Sea gas field, released a new report. It claims their project will not materially influence climate change. That is the official line. Their latest Environmental Impact Assessment puts their lifetime emissions at less than 0.02 percent of global greenhouse gases. Tiny. Almost invisible.
You can argue that zero percent would have been better.
But here is the setup. This wasn’t just another PR puff piece. It was ordered by the courts. A judge had previously ruled that the government’s consent for Jackdaw was illegal. The paperwork had been thin. Regulators wanted it thicker. Environmental groups had pushed back, trying to block both Jackdaw and the nearby Rosebank oil project. They lost that specific battle, so the math got scrutinized.
Adura is a joint venture. Shell. Equinor. Heavyweights.
Their 159-page argument boils down to a swap. Instead of buying liquefied natural gas from the US, we buy it from Jackdaw. The logic? Domestic gas saves the planet compared to imported gas. How? By cutting out the travel.
Liquefying gas. Shipping it across oceans. Regasifying it at the destination. That process leaks. Adura’s report estimates this swap saves the equivalent of four million tonnes of carbon. It argues that importing would cause roughly 20 percent more emissions. So local is actually better? That’s the pitch.
They also leaned on bureaucracy as a shield.
“Minor” is their word for the climate impact.
Why? Because the UK regulates well. The industry has targets. It aligns with the Paris Agreement. The rules exist, therefore the harm is controlled.
Does a clean balance sheet fix the sky? Probably not.
But 0.02 percent is a hard number to punch holes in. The regulator accepts the new submission. The legal hurdle is cleared. The gas keeps flowing.
The argument rests on subtraction, not elimination. We are burning less by choosing which gas to burn. It is a narrow escape, legally and technically. But an escape nonetheless.
What else would you have them say?
