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Caroline Lucas calls for action on the granting of deep water drilling licenses ahead of her adjournment debate.
On October 1st 2010, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) slipped out its decision to grant an exploration licence to oil giant Chevron to drill into the Lagavulin prospect, approximately 260km north of the Shetland Isles. This was the first approval of a deepwater drilling project in the UK since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – a tragedy that killed eleven people and caused untold environmental and economic damage earlier this year.
As a matter of great importance for the UK's short and the long term environmental and economic interests, as well as an issue of significant public interest and concern, you might have expected a little more scrutiny and debate.
Yet the adjournment debate tonight is the first time that Parliament has been given the opportunity to discuss the matter. It has not gone unnoticed that the date of the government's decision to approve the Lagavulin drilling fell almost exactly in the middle of the conference recess. A cynic might suggest that this left it free of the detailed parliamentary scrutiny that a debate on the announcement would have permitted – or, indeed, the media spotlight that would have accompanied such a deliberation.
So, just how was the decision to approve this exploration drill made? And why was the decision announced during a parliamentary recess, just a couple of weeks after the September sitting and just 10 days before the House was due to return on the 11th of October? These are serious questions relating to accountability and transparency in the decision-making process.
Equally serious is the fact that the government signed off the Lagavulin project before the official US government's report into Deepwater Horizon has concluded – thus without a full understanding of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, or what should be done to avoid a repeat disaster. If the government loses the judicial challenge now being brought by Greenpeace, up to 22 other drilling licensing decisions could be called into question.
Under the EU Habitats Directive, the government is required by law to be certain that there will be no likely significant effects from deepwater drilling to protected areas – Special Areas of Conservation. Greenpeace highlights the fact that DECC's reliance on the Strategic Environmental Assessment report of June 2009 as the basis on which to give the green light to deepwater drilling may be unlawful, as it was drafted before the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.
Reports that the well at Lagavulin will use the same safety equipment and contractor as Deepwater Horizon, with a Cameron blowout preventer and Halliburton doing the cementing, hardly increase confidence in the project. What's more, conditions in the North Sea mean cleaning up after an incident would pose a significantly greater challenge than in the Mexican Gulf Coast. Colder waters would cause the oil to disperse more slowly, causing greater damage to wildlife. The remoteness of the Lagavulin site would add huge strain to a cleanup operation, as would the possibility of rough weather and high seas.
Even the oil industry itself has been reticent to develop deep water drilling West of Shetland because of its remoteness, the technical difficulties in extracting oil, and the high cost of doing so. That is, until government subsidies of up £12bn in tax breaks over 8 years provided a greater incentive.
More widely, the current push for deep water oil and gas exploration poses a serious challenge to the Coalition's commitment to be the "greenest government ever". How opening-up new oil and gas fields in the North Sea will benefit efforts to increase energy efficiency, as well as energy generation from renewable sources, remains to be seen.
Instead of permitting ever riskier new oil wells in remote and dangerous parts of the UK continental shelf, the government could put the obscene subsidies being paid out to oil companies to drill in areas even they had deemed risky until now to much better use. Every pound we invest in old, unsustainable technologies, is a pound not spent on the new, job creating, renewable technologies of the future or even the measures for today that would cut the cost and economic impact of heating homes, and daily travel.
Ultimately, I do not believe that governments should be issuing new licenses for deepwater drilling until the causes of the explosion at Deepwater Horizon are fully understood. This why I am calling for a moratorium on the granting of any new licenses – at the very least until the US government investigation has concluded. And until the courts here have ruled on the legality of the government's decision to approve the Lagavulin drilling, that operation should be halted.
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