Rosebank consultation closes
At close of business today, the Rosebank consultation ended — and the decision machinery now grinds: OPRED reviews the submissions, ministers decide, and if approved, operations could begin in 2027. The numbers, on the record: an £8.7bn development, 350+ million barrels, peak production of 69,000 barrels a day — about a tenth of UK Continental Shelf output — with developer Adura promising 3,500 construction jobs, 880 permanent roles, and 125 apprenticeships. Adura's CEO calls it a "major step"; Shetland's own MSP, a former Equinor employee no less, says she still doesn't "have all the facts to take a decision" — an honesty which, from someone better placed than nearly anyone in Britain to know, should give ministers pause. Telling detail from the pipework: the gas comes ashore at Sullom Voe. The oil bypasses Shetland entirely.
The jobs are real and I won't pretend otherwise — 880 permanent positions in a place like Shetland is transformative, and 125 apprenticeships is a generation of skilled workers. Anyone waving this away from London is doing climate politics with other people's livelihoods.
Do the arithmetic the announcement invites you not to. £8.7bn buys 880 permanent jobs — roughly £10m per job — for a field whose oil ships past Shetland to world markets and whose approval already faces a court-cleared legal challenge. My submission, formally lodged today as the consultation closed, offers the comparison directly: a directly-funded Shetland jobs and energy package matching all 880 permanent roles — grid, storage, port infrastructure, the Sullom Voe transition — at roughly half the capital, with none of the litigation risk and all of the output staying British. If the case for Rosebank is jobs, mine is the cheaper jobs programme. If the case is energy security, the oil's export route refutes it in one sentence. What remains is the honest case — investor confidence in the basin — and that deserves an honest debate, not a security costume.
The submission went in (Mission 2), and alongside it the follow-through on yesterday's O'Shea alarm: fast-tracked gas storage expansion — the unglamorous, unphotogenic decision that actually moves this winter's risk, now in the ledger with sites and dates. And month-four Budget prep began for 16 September — with a decision I'll announce tomorrow about how that Budget gets published, which I'm told will annoy the Treasury of every universe simultaneously. Good.
respectful of the other side's case for once — the Energy Secretary observed that Rosebank is the rare issue where both governments are trying to solve a real problem and merely disagree on the maths. The Glass Box logged it as our most generous entry to date. It won't last.
Next dispatch: tomorrow, 6pm.