The North Sea a gold mine? Let’s have a look at that
This morning, GB News put a man called Fraser Meyers on their TV channel. Meyers is deputy editor of Spiked magazine – a publication that has received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, one of the largest funders of climate science denial in the world. He was there to talk about the energy crisis and what Britain should do about it.
“We are sitting on our own gold mine,” he told viewers. “A huge amount of potential oil and gas that we could be drilling.”
It’s a good line, kinda sounds like common sense. It has the indignation of someone who can’t believe the obvious answer is being ignored by idiots in government.
Yet it is, from start to finish, wrong.
Not slightly off. Not missing a few details. Wrong in ways that are documented by the oil industry’s own trade body. Wrong in ways that are confirmed by the financial decisions of every major oil company that has looked hard at the North Sea recently and quietly packed its bags. Shell and ExxonMobil have been trying to sell their jointly-held North Sea gas fields. Chevron left after 55 years – calling it a “review of global operations,” which is corporate-speak for “we can make more money somewhere else.” BP sold off North Sea licences in October 2025. These are not companies abandoning a treasure chest. These are companies that know exactly what’s left in the jar and have decided that scraping it isn’t worth the effort.
When the people who actually own the thing are selling up, and Reform’s Richard Tice is standing in Aberdeen calling it “our energy treasure,” someone in that sentence is considerably more informed than the other. And I’ll give you a clue – it ain’t Richard Tice…
Meyers isn’t alone in saying it. Kemi Badenoch has called North Sea drilling “the only way we can protect families from rising bills.” Nigel Farage has borrowed Donald Trump’s slogan – “drill baby, drill” – demanding the government “open up the licences and become self-sufficient in natural gas.” Tice himself went to Aberdeen last week and declared he wants “every last barrel, every last drop.”
And anyone who disagrees? Captured by green ideology. Doesn’t live in the real world, like they (allegedly) do.
So let’s talk about the real world.
The North Sea peaked twenty-six years ago.
Not recently. And not because of Labour, or net zero targets, or Ed Miliband. The basin hit its highest ever output in 1999, and has been falling ever since – because that’s just what happens when you take a finite resource out of the ground at industrial scale for several decades; it’s a simple geological fact-of-life.
By 2025 we were getting roughly 20% of what came out at the millennium. For gas specifically, output had fallen 74% from its peak. These figures don’t come from a government department. They come from Offshore Energies UK – the industry’s own trade body, the organisation whose entire job is to lobby for more drilling and put the best possible face on what’s left. Even they don’t dispute the trajectory. Their own 2025 Business Outlook confirms that production has been declining at an average of 9% a year since 2020.
But the raw numbers only tell half the story. To understand why this matters so much, you need to understand something about how oil extraction actually works – something Fraser Meyers didn’t mention, and Farage and Badenoch would rather you didn’t think about, because it doesn’t square with the political points they’re busy trying to score.
You can think of it like a jar of jam…
When you first open a new jar, getting jam out is easy. Dip a spoon in, it comes up full. Barely any effort. The return on that effort is high.
Near the end of the jar, everything changes. You tilt it. You scrape the sides. You dig a knife into the edges and under the rim. You spend three times the effort for a tenth of the result.
Oil fields work exactly the same way. In the North Sea’s early years, the big easy reservoirs were right there – massive underground lakes of oil and gas that came up almost by themselves once you drilled in the right place. For every unit of energy you put into getting it out, you got back around 30 units. That surplus – everything left over after paying the extraction cost – is what actually runs an economy. It pays for hospitals, schools, heating, transport, manufacturing. The bigger the surplus, the more society can do. The smaller the surplus, the more of everyone’s effort just goes into keeping the energy coming, with less and less left for anything else.
As a field ages, that surplus shrinks. The easy stuff is gone. What remains is smaller, deeper, harder to reach, sitting in trickier geology, further from existing infrastructure. You need more equipment, more fuel, more specialist engineering – and you get less back for all of that effort.
The numbers show exactly this happening in real time. The cost of getting one barrel out of the North Sea seabed was £13.82 in 2020. By 2024 it had risen to £19.49 – a 41% increase in four years, driven not by taxes or regulations but by geology. In some fields it now exceeds £30 per barrel. In parts of the Middle East, the same barrel costs between $5 and $10 to produce.
That’s not a political gap; the gap is purely geological . And it’s why the major oil companies are leaving. They’re not being driven out by Ed Miliband or a commitment to net-zero. They’re doing the same maths any sensible business would do and concluding that the jar isn’t worth scraping any more.
So when Meyers tells GB News viewers Britain is “sitting on a gold mine,” he is describing a mine where extraction costs have tripled in fifteen years, where Shell, Exxon, Chevron and BP are all heading for the exit, and where someone else can get the identical product out of the ground for a fraction of the price. That’s not a gold mine; that’s an almost-empty jar that hurts your hand to carry on trying to scrape.
93% of it is already gone – and the rest won’t touch your bills
Of all the oil and gas the North Sea ever held – everything extractable from the 1960s all the way through to 2050 – around 93% has already been taken out. Only a meagre seven percent remains. And the extra that new drilling could realistically add to that? For gas, official projections put it at around 1.1% of the lifetime total. For oil, 1.7%.
The two fields Badenoch keeps pointing to – Jackdaw and Rosebank, the crown jewels of the “Get Britain Drilling” campaign – have been independently researched. Jackdaw would displace around 2% of the UK’s current gas imports. Rosebank around 1%. Together, roughly 3% of what we import.
Meyers told GB News viewers that one of these fields “has enough gas to power 6% of British homes.” What he didn’t explain is that this is the field’s entire output across its whole lifetime – not an ongoing supply. It’s like saying a bag of coal can heat your house. Technically true, for a couple of days. After that, it’s gone – kaput.
When politicians tell you the North Sea is the answer to the energy crisis, they’re telling you that 3% is the answer. To a crisis affecting the whole country. They’re being very economical with anything even vaguely related to truth.
Even if significantly more was left down there – even if the geology was better and the costs were lower – it still wouldn’t reduce your bills. This isn’t a green campaigner making that argument. It’s Oxford University, which ran the numbers on the most generous scenario imaginable: the UK extracts every last drop and hands every penny of tax revenue directly to households.
Under those assumptions, your annual energy bill would fall by between £16 and £82.
Your average bill right now is £1,776.
The maximum conceivable saving – in a scenario nobody believes would actually happen – is roughly the cost of a couple of mediocre meals out.
The reason is simple. Oil and gas prices are set by global markets. The North Sea produces too little to move those markets. Whether a barrel comes from a platform off Aberdeen or a tanker from Qatar, the price you pay is decided internationally. This has been explained repeatedly by energy economists for years, yet it doesn’t appear to have reached certain people with very loud platforms.
Badenoch knows this. When the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg pushed her on it directly, she admitted – on camera, on a Sunday morning – that “the drilling isn’t going to go directly onto people’s bills.” She then spent the rest of the week insisting it would help indirectly through tax revenues. Her own shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho – the same person now in charge of the policy – said on the record when she was actually in government that new licences “wouldn’t necessarily bring energy bills down.”
So the flagship policy is built on a claim its own architect admitted is false. On live television. Yet the campaign rolls on regardless.
Meyers, to his credit, also let it slip on GB News – in almost the same breath as calling it a gold mine. “This isn’t to say that you could open it up tomorrow and that would solve the problem,” he said. He then argued for it anyway, on the basis that tax revenue might eventually help subsidise bills. Which is precisely the roundabout mechanism Oxford already costed at between £16 and £82 a year. Maximum.
So what would the same money actually buy?
If the argument for drilling is about investment – putting money into domestic energy – then it’s worth asking what that investment actually returns compared to the alternative.
Don’t take the government’s word for it. Take the financial sector’s.
BloombergNEF – Bloomberg’s own market research arm, whose entire purpose is telling investors where money actually grows – found that in 2025, clean energy investment outpaced fossil fuel supply investment globally for the second consecutive year, with the gap widening to over $100 billion. The International Energy Agency was founded after the 1973 oil crisis specifically to protect Western energy security. It has no brief to promote environmentalism. It found that for every dollar now spent globally on fossil fuels, $1.70 goes to clean energy. Five years ago that ratio was 1:1. In other words, the serious money has already voted.
The International Renewable Energy Agency – an intergovernmental body answerable to its member states – analysed every new power project commissioned globally in 2024 and found that 91% of new renewable projects were cheaper than any new fossil fuel alternative. Solar was 41% cheaper. Onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The renewable capacity added in 2024 alone avoided fossil fuel costs worth $467 billion worldwide.
A joint study by the IEA and Imperial College Business School tracked the actual financial performance of energy companies across a decade. It found that renewable power companies delivered higher total investment returns than fossil fuel companies – with lower risk. Returns on assets for fossil fuel companies fell from 4% to below 2% over that period. Renewable returns edged upward.
These are not climate campaigners. These are the institutions and analysts whose job is to follow the money. And the money is not going into a basin that peaked way back in 1999.
Closer to home, the picture is just as clear. The last time Russia turned off the gas tap, it cost the UK £183 billion over four years. More than the entire NHS spent on health services in a single year. Energy bills nearly doubled. Millions of households couldn’t keep warm. Yet British windfarms, in 2025 alone, cut wholesale electricity prices by almost a third – not as a projection, not as a promise, but as a measurable fact.
New onshore wind and solar now cost between £41 and £48 per megawatt hour to generate. New gas-fired generation costs £124 – nearly three times as much. And once a wind farm is built, the fuel is free. The price doesn’t spike when a war breaks out. It doesn’t respond to decisions made in Moscow or Tehran or Washington or Riyadh. It just blows.
Oxford’s analysis puts the potential household saving from a genuinely renewable-powered grid at up to £441 a year. Not a climate projection. A financial calculation based on what electricity costs when it stops being priced by gas.
“Woke.” The most expensive word in British politics?
The story that has taken hold – on Reform leaflets, in tabloid headlines, across GB News and much of the right-wing press – is that pushing for renewables is ‘ideology’, a luxury belief held by people who don’t worry about their bills, imposed on people who do.
This is completely backwards – and it’s worth being clear about who it actually harms.
The people most hurt by volatile energy prices are those – like me, and probably like you – spending the biggest share of our income on keeping warm. The people who can’t absorb a price spike by cutting a holiday or switching supermarkets. The ones who were already in fuel poverty before the Middle East conflict sent gas prices up another 50%. We are the people whose lives would most improve from an energy system that doesn’t lurch every time there’s a war near a shipping lane.
Renewable energy, once built, has no fuel costs. The price doesn’t spike when bombs drop. It doesn’t respond to decisions in Riyadh or Washington. And that is what real energy security looks like – not dependence on a basin that peaked a quarter century ago and now costs six times as much per barrel to drain as the cheapest alternatives on the planet.
Meyers told GB News viewers that wind is “intermittent” – which is true, and a real engineering challenge – but said nothing about the fact that the UK already generates more than half its electricity from renewables, that grid balancing is a solved problem across multiple countries, and that the intermittency argument is being deployed in defence of an energy source that doesn’t just stop when the wind drops but runs out entirely when the geology is exhausted. Permanently.
Real patriots would follow the evidence
A patriot – someone who genuinely gives a damn about the people of this country rather than the interests bankrolling their campaigns – would start from an unblinkered, honest look at what we have. A depleted basin. Extraction costs that have nearly tripled in fifteen years. A 7% remnant that the industry’s own data confirms cannot reverse the decline.
Then they’d look at the alternative. Energy that gets cheaper every year. Energy that doesn’t leave ordinary families exposed to the decisions of foreign governments and distant conflicts. Energy that generates jobs that don’t disappear when a field runs dry.
It’s worth being specific about whose interests are actually being served here, because the money trail is far from subtle. Spiked magazine – whose deputy editor appeared on GB News this morning calling the North Sea a gold mine – received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, one of the world’s largest funders of climate science denial and fossil fuel lobbying. While Badenoch was standing on an oil rig in Aberdeen last week calling for more drilling, she was at a company whose owner has donated more than £250,000 to the Conservative party since she became its leader. Before that visit, she had accepted a private retreat at the home of another Conservative donor who chairs a climate-sceptic lobby group.
The people funding the “Get Britain Drilling” campaign are, in several literal cases, the people who would personally profit from Britain foolishly doing just that.
Meanwhile the people bearing the cost of delay are the ones sitting in cold houses, watching their bills go up, wondering why the obvious answer – build the energy system that actually can’t be held hostage by a war in the Gulf – keeps getting shouted down as woke.
Fossil fools. Both kinds
Farage calls it patriotism. Badenoch calls it national security. Tice calls it “our energy treasure.” Meyers calls it a gold mine.
The industry’s own trade body confirms 9% annual decline. The world’s biggest oil companies are selling their stakes and leaving. Bloomberg’s financial analysts show clean energy outperforming fossil fuels for investment returns. Oxford’s economists show maximum household saving from unlimited new drilling at £82 a year. And Badenoch’s own shadow energy secretary said it wouldn’t bring bills down when she was the one responsible for the policy.
There’s a word for people who sell you something that can’t do what they claim, while the money of those backing them stays firmly in their pockets.
And there’s a word for an industry with mounting costs, depleting reservoirs, and fifty years of burning through a one-time national inheritance – leaving communities near Aberdeen with falling incomes, rising fuel poverty, and growing reliance on food banks, even as hundreds of new licences were handed out and the major oil companies quietly packed their bags.
Fossil fools. Both kinds.
Someone in this debate is out of touch with reality. Someone is ignoring the evidence, dismissing the data, and selling a solution they know can’t work to people who deserve far better.
And I can say with absolute certainty, it isn’t the people arguing for renewables.