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Https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/07/uk-biggest-north-sea-operator-slashes-jobs-windfall-tax/

One of the UK’s largest oil and gas producers has been forced to cut 250 jobs in Aberdeen, blaming the Government’s windfall taxes for making the Britain’s energy industry unprofitable.

Harbour Energy, which operates in the North Sea, said a review of its operations would lead to the loss of 250 onshore roles – equal to 25pc of its workforce.

In a clear warning to Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Scott Barr, the company’s managing director, also said that Harbour could pull out of two carbon capture projects that are crucial to the UK’s net zero ambitions.

‘Government’s ongoing punitive fiscal position’ for action

Jonathan Leake

Related Topics

Oil and Gas UK, North Sea oil, Ed Miliband, Scotland, Energy industry, Windfall tax

07 May 2025 2:56pm BST

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Oil rig

Harbour Energy’s decision will send shock waves through the UK offshore industry

One of the UK’s largest oil and gas producers has been forced to cut 250 jobs in Aberdeen, blaming the Government’s windfall taxes for making the Britain’s energy industry unprofitable.

Harbour Energy, which operates in the North Sea, said a review of its operations would lead to the loss of 250 onshore roles – equal to 25pc of its workforce.

In a clear warning to Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, Scott Barr, the company’s managing director, also said that Harbour could pull out of two carbon capture projects that are crucial to the UK’s net zero ambitions.

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The announcement will send shock waves through the UK offshore industry and Aberdeen.

Harbour Energy provides roughly 15pc of the UK’s oil and gas – making it vital to national energy security. Through its supply chain, the company is also one of north-east Scotland’s key job generators.

Mention of clean energy, but no mention yet of new supportive measures for development of oil and gas fields....

https://www.ft.com/content/7c49ea15-cf40-42ef-a44c-07adf7dd74a0

Ministers are drawing up plans to help shield British industry from sky-high energy costs in what is expected to be the centrepiece of Sir Keir Starmer’s vaunted new industrial strategy.

Business leaders have been assured by ministers that they are serious about dealing with the problem, which leaves British companies facing much higher energy prices than major competitors.

“If we don’t deal with uncompetitive energy prices, it doesn’t really matter what else we do,” said one government official working on the industrial strategy.

“If we put out an industrial strategy without dealing with the single biggest thing that is making business uncompetitive, we would be rightly laughed at.”

The industrial strategy, to be published in June, is seen in Downing Street as a big part of Starmer’s political fightback, after Labour was hammered in last week’s local elections in industrial regions such as Durham.

Number 10 is focused particularly on connecting the strategy with a promised rearmament drive, while the wide-ranging plan will also address Britain’s chronic skills shortages. Ministers are prioritising eight sectors: advanced manufacturing, CLEAN ENERGY, creative industries, defence, digital and technologies, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services......

Although details of how to cut industrial energy costs are still being thrashed out, one option being considered — according to those working on the plan — is to further cut network charges paid by industrial users.

A British industry “Supercharger”, announced by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government to help some energy-intensive companies, last year cut network charges by 60 per cent. One person involved in discussions said that figure could increase.

UK industry has long complained that high energy costs make it uncompetitive, particularly compared with the US and China.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the founder of chemicals giant Ineos, warned last month that “excessive” energy costs as well as carbon taxes were “squeezing the life out of the sector”.

Including taxes, the UK’s industrial electricity prices in 2023 were about four times higher than those in the US and 46 per cent higher than Germany’s, according to the International Energy Agency.

A government spokesman said: “Our modern industrial strategy will target the most promising sectors for the UK’s future prosperity, including advanced manufacturing and clean energy.”

Https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/norway-is-laughing-at-milibands-net-zero-folly/

......................

Norway has no net zero target. Why? Because its government, unlike ours, seems to have thought the whole thing through properly and realised that to go all the way to net zero would be fantastically expensive. It is one thing curtailing your carbon emissions; quite another blocking off every conceivable source of them. Norway, unlike Britain, values economic growth over ideological purity.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise, then, that Norway’s energy minister, Terje Aasland, has just scorned Britain’s policy of running down North Sea production of oil and gas. His own country, he says, will continue to develop the North Sea for the long term. It will do so, he says, partly because the industry has helped make the country fantastically rich, allowing it to build up a sovereign wealth fund which our own deeply-indebted government can only envy, and partly because it recognises that however hard you might aspire to switch to clean energy, it is a long process, and that industrialised societies will remain reliant on fossil fuels for decades to come.

‘The oil and gas industry and the service industry is really important’, Aasland said. ‘It saves jobs and creates a lot of value for Norwegian society. I think in the UK, the oil and gas industry has contributed in just the same way – until now.’

His words expose the foolishness of Ed Miliband’s ban on issuing new oil and gas licences. Rather than the pragmatic approach taken by Norway, Miliband is following an absolutist policy which is condemning Britain to become less wealthy and less energy-secure in the process. The Energy and Climate Secretary keeps lecturing us on the need to free ourselves from what he calls ‘fossil fuel dictators’, yet in practice he is making us far more dependent on imported energy.

This applies not just to oil and gas, by the way, but also to electricity. Britain’s massive boom in wind and solar simply isn’t doing the job of replacing the coal plants we have closed – in fact, we are importing ever-increasing amounts of electricity via subsea cables, from Norway included. Last year, a record 13 per cent of electricity consumed in Britain was imported in this way.

While Britain hit the oil and gas industry with windfall taxes in recent years, Norway offered tax concessions to ensure that oil and gas exploration could continue during Covid, in order to maintain Norway’s energy independence. That just about sums up the difference between UK and Norwegian policy. This week, with Tony Blair’s intervention, it seemed briefly as if the government might transition towards a more level-headed policy. But sadly, with Keir Starmer taking Miliband’s rather than Blair’s side, and Blair bizarrely backtracking on his remarks, the moment has passed.

(continued)

No less concerning is that Team GB’s big energy medal-winner for the past 50 years — offshore oil and gas production — is being forced into an early retirement, despite being the country’s energy fulcrum. All of this being done at the same time poses serious challenges to the UK’s energy resilience and national security.

It’s clear that we are in a time where geopolitical instability, economic volatility and existential climate threats are converging at pace. This should be a moment to draw breath and reappraise. The Dutch are doing just that, ramping up gas production and supporting new projects to cover domestic demand up to 2045.

Like the Netherlands, four fifths of UK households are dependent on gas for heating. But the government here remains committed to banning future North Sea exploration and production licences. This will simply accelerate the decline of domestic oil and gas production and increase our dependency on gas imports.

Any rapid decline of North Sea oil and gas production will hit the country’s coffers hard, quashing Treasury hopes of raising £19 billion from the industry over the next five years. And across society, bill-payers will question why they are subsidising a domestic clean power sprint that is offshoring UK jobs and value. Right now, the promised nirvana of new, well paid, domestic “green jobs” seems a distant prospect.

There will be many benefits from the transition to net zero but the choices we make in getting there must be better than those offered by the false prophets of climate fundamentalism and diversionary populism.

We are living in an increasingly uncertain world, where events are forcing governments to reassess essential questions of security and national resilience. It feels like a mistake to move at breakneck speed away from established energy sources that also deliver prosperity for country and communities alike, while putting even more reliance on intermittent and potentially unreliable ones.

The government is grappling with the legacy of 14 years of politically driven economic and industrial failure, where big decisions were often put in the “too hard to do” pile. Action is needed. For the UK, this means building things that we can rely on when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, like a new nuclear power station at Sizewell C.

And, in a country where more than 23 million homes have gas boilers and vital foundation manufacturing industries depend on gas, it means lifting the ban on future oil and gas licences. It also means developing a skills base that can deliver the change we need, with manufacturing and supply chains that can compete with those from China and elsewhere.

We desperately need this transition to work for our future prosperity, security and climate. But events affecting Spain and its neighbours are a warning about resilience too. We should watch and learn.

We lack the skills and supply chain for a swift transition, and must have energy we can rely on

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/north-sea-still-vital-in-the-rush-for-net-zero-knnc7fd5m

Sir Tony Blair’s call for a reset of the government’s “irrational” net zero policies dominated headlines last week. His intervention generated a predictable political squabble but the substance of his institute’s report chimed with what many of us have been saying about how our country should be approaching the transition to net zero. But while UK eyes were focused on matters at home, the real energy story was happening elsewhere in Europe.

Last Monday Spain’s electricity grid suffered a catastrophic failure. Millions across the country, and in Portugal and parts of France too, were left without power. Lights went out in homes, electronic payments failed, transportation was stranded. It was the biggest blackout to affect Europe in two decades, an event that should be a massive wake-up call to all involved in the debate on net zero and the drive to decarbonise power.

I’d like to think our government, at all levels, was asking the critical question: what if this happens to us? Because it could have. Days later, we learnt that the National Energy System Operator observed unexpected power frequency shifts in the UK grid hours before Spain’s blackout, with power failures occurring at the Keadby 2 power station in Lincolnshire and the Viking Link interconnector between the UK and Denmark. Investigations are under way.

Populist right-wing voices predictably rushed to blame renewables for the Spanish blackout but, like so much of the “anti-politics” of their movement, that is a diversion. The real questions are about wider national energy resilience and security of supply, and how both should be at the forefront of governments’ net zero plans. My union, the GMB, believes the existing trajectory risks putting the energy cart before the industrial horse, resulting in a new trilemma of people, places and pipelines.

The UK’s skills crises in trades and Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are well known — we have a shortfall of about 175,000 Stem workers, 100,000 electricians and 35,000 welders, while one fifth of existing energy workers are expected to retire by 2030. In addition, there is a lack of manufacturing capacity and supply-chain readiness — £46 billion worth of cable contracts were recently awarded for grid upgrade projects, yet we still don’t have the necessary domestic manufacturing capacity to do this work here.

UK firms and workers need fiscal and regulatory certainty, and state incentivisation and support, to secure investment and compete for energy manufacturing contracts. Yet we seem to have fired the starting gun on the sprint to clean power without getting our runners “race ready”.

(continued)

“We seem to have fired the starting gun on the sprint to clean power without getting our runners ‘race ready’,” he said.

Smith also repeated his criticism of the ban on new North Sea oil and gas exploration licences, citing the approach of the Dutch, who are ramping up gas production and supporting new projects to cover domestic demand up to 2045.

“Like the Netherlands, four fifths of UK households are dependent on gas for heating. But the government here remains committed to banning future North Sea exploration and production licences,” he said. “This will simply accelerate the decline of domestic oil and gas production and increase our dependency on gas imports. Across society, bill-payers will question why they are subsidising a domestic clean power sprint that is offshoring UK jobs and value.”

Smith also attacked Miliband’s pledge of new green jobs, saying it was a “promised nirvana” that seemed like a “distant prospect”.

“There will be many benefits from the transition to net zero but the choices we make in getting there must be better than those offered by the false prophets of climate fundamentalism and diversionary populism,” he wrote.

Miliband was attacked after he sacked Dame Mary Archer from the board of the Department for

Energy Security and Net Zero in a move critics said was designed to “suppress all opposition” to his policies.

Archer was told on Friday she was being removed from her position, days after Sir Tony Blair said the government’s net-zero policy was doomed to failure. Her husband, Lord Archer of Western-super-Mare, retired as a Conservative peer last year.

It is understood that Archer broadly shared Blair’s criticisms of the policy and allies said her removal came “out of the blue.”

Sir Christopher Chope, a Conservative member of the Commons energy security and net-zero committee, said he believed ministers were “quite keen to suppress all opposition to their net zero zealotry”.

He said: “Clearly they are not interested in listening to people on their board who may have a different point of view. The attitude of the secretary of state seems to be to double down and resist all criticism or comments from people who have an alternative viewpoint, and this has just added to the challenge of holding the government to account on these policies.”

A government spokesman said Archer’s departure was “part of a wider restructuring of the departmental board”.

He added: “A refresh will ensure the department puts its best foot forward in delivering the prime minister’s mission to become a clean energy superpower, lower bills for families and create jobs across the country. The secretary of state thanks Dame Mary for her work as a member of the board.”

Gary Smith, the head of the GMB, warned that Britain could face blackouts like those seen in Spain last week

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/ed-milibands-net-zero-deadline-is-unrealistic-says-union-boss-m7pw8dtzb

Sir Keir Starmer has been urged by one of Labour’s largest supporting unions to ignore the “false prophets of climate fundamentalism” and rethink the government’s net-zero plans.

In an article for The Times, Gary Smith, the GMB general secretary, warned that the government’s pledge to switch to clean power by 2030 was unrealistic and could lead to blackouts like those seen in Spain last week.

Smith also criticises plans to ban future North Sea exploration licences, saying it would “accelerate the decline of domestic oil and gas production and increase our dependency on gas imports”.

The union leader’s comments will be seen as a coded attack on Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who is pushing hard on the government’s net-zero agenda, despite reservations from some senior Labour figures who are close to Starmer.

While Smith did not name Miliband in his article, the two have clashed over the push to speed up North Sea decarbonisation.

In his article, Smith said that Spain’s “catastrophic” electricity grid failure should be a “massive wake-up call” to ministers. “I’d like to think our government, at all levels, was asking the critical question, ‘What if this happens to us?’ Because it could have,” he wrote.

“The real questions are about wider national energy resilience and security of supply, and how both should be at the forefront of governments’ net-zero plans. My union believes the existing trajectory risks putting the energy cart before the industrial horse.”

Smith said the UK did not have enough trained workers and supply chains to successfully increase the electricity grid’s capacity to meet the 2030 deadline, and that while £46 billion worth of cable contracts had recently been awarded for grid upgrade projects, the UK still did not have the necessary manufacturing capacity to do this work here.

(continued)

Unions are also applying pressure over the central election pledge to cut bills. The Times understands that at a recent meeting of trade union leaders in Downing Street, Smith challenged the government to clarify exactly when it hoped to achieve its election pledge of cutting £300 from household electricity bills. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, has been similarly confrontational.

Energy UK, the trade association for the energy industry, recently warned that “urgent action” was needed on the issue. The government’s breadth of environment policies, involving investment in clean technology such as offshore wind and solar power, would only result in “modest reductions” by 2030, with a five- to ten-year lag before prices begin to drop. “It cannot be right” to ask consumers to wait, it said. “As things stand, the government has not yet set out a plan of action to reduce household energy bills by £300 by 2030. Relying on a decrease in international gas prices — over which we have no control — is not the solution.”

There are predictions that the energy price cap will fall by £166 in July, mainly due to falling wholesale gas prices rather than government policies.

The Conservatives have said that Labour’s plan to align the UK emissions trading system (ETS) with that of Europe will have the unwanted effect of increasing energy costs to consumers. According to Bloomberg, the EU’s new ETS, which requires companies to purchase credits for each tonne of greenhouse gases they produce, could have the world’s highest carbon price of €149 (£127) per metric tonne in 2030.

Supporters say alignment of the UK and EU carbon markets will boost market stability and reduce compliance costs for businesses. But Tory MPs have sounded the alarm over the EU’s plans to include transport and heating emissions in its carbon price, and the potential cost of it to British families for their cars and home heating.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, minister for energy consumers, told MPs that the government was engaging with British industry on the issue, and “ultimately, we are doing everything that we can to bear down on energy costs in this country”.

Andrew Bowie, the acting shadow energy secretary, said: “Labour’s promise to cut bills by £300 is missing in action, and now they’re planning to join an expanded EU carbon tax scheme, which means higher energy bills for everyone, more punitive carbon taxes on British industry, and new taxes on families to heat their homes and drive their cars.

“Voters know they are being asked to make huge financial sacrifices for a minimal impact on global emissions.”

Miliband was also recently criticised over government subsidies to the Drax power station, which uses wood pellets for electricity generation, although supporters point out that he has reduced the amount of taxpayer cash and that recent blackouts in Spain show the necessity of traditional energy backups.

Labour recriminations are flying over the cost of net-zero policies

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/ed-miliband-labour-bills-lg9mb7zvc

On the election campaign trail last year, Ed Miliband and Sir Keir Starmer repeatedly promised that their plans to make Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030 would result in a £300 cut in energy bills. Now, as recriminations fly over their net-zero policies and the financial sacrifice required of the public, the ability to hit that bill target is shaping up as one of the energy secretary’s biggest tests.

Miliband’s position was shored up by No 10 this week, when Tony Blair’s criticism of net-zero policies was rowed back in less than 24 hours, but the bills issue looms as a major sticking point. The energy industry has warned that despite it being a central campaign pledge Labour was failing to put policies in place that would cut bills, while the Tories say that plans to align carbon pricing with the EU instead risks inflicting higher rates on consumers. Meanwhile the unions, long a bedrock of support for Miliband, have lashed out on the impact on jobs.

Speaking at an energy security summit last week, Miliband read out a message of support from the King. It echoed Miliband’s own views that the transition to more sustainable energy sources can lead to “more resilient and secure” energy systems.

While clearly aligned with the monarch, Miliband’s relationship with trade unions, his traditional support base, is increasingly rocky.

A few days later Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB Union, lashed out over the “growing sense of betrayal” over Great British Energy, Labour’s publicly owned clean energy company. He said it was “bonkers” and “absolute madness” to be cutting off investment into North Sea oil and gas, warning that it would result in job losses while being “catastrophic for the environment because we are importing oil and gas, which is far more carbon-intensive than producing it ourselves”. Miliband has repeatedly emphasised the need to wean off fossil fuels for future economic and national security.

(continued)

in southern England. And, of course, the memory-holing of Labour’s promised commitment to a £300 cut in energy bills.

Ed Miliband and the green Blob mouth their mantras about cheap and reliable renewables, but we can all now see that the reality is quite the opposite. They keep blaming gas prices, but in fact the gas price is now back down to its pre-Ukraine war norms. Our energy is expensive because renewables are inherently expensive and must be subsidised, and because they must be paid not just to switch on but also to switch off. But Labour simply won’t admit it.

Starmer and Miliband may close their eyes and ears to the facts, but a much more successful and subtle Labour politician, Sir Tony Blair, can see the way things are going. His punchy foreword to his own institute’s report this week described the current net zero programme as “irrational” and argued that the closing down of debate meant that “the campaign stays in the hands of those who end up alienating the very opinion on which consent for action depends”. I wonder who he could possibly have had in mind?

The truth is that the great days of net zero are over. Its proponents just don’t realise it yet. The policy is moving away from them. The British public don’t trust what they are told. They aren’t willing to pay any more. They think the Norwegian energy minister has a point in wondering why this country won’t invest in the North Sea as they do. They have also realised that the rest of the world is laughing at us Europeans for wrecking our own economies while they invest in coal. And they can see that European governments are behaving like cartoon characters who have run off the cliff but haven’t looked down yet.

That can’t last. The tectonic plates are swiftly shifting. The Tories are joining Reform in distancing themselves from the craziness of this agenda. One day, and it will be soon, the whole net zero climate mentality is going to disappear in a puff of smoke, just as the Covid madness did. And not a moment too soon. The Climate Change Committee will be thrown on to the junk heap of history and we will never speak of it again. Will Labour leave this to the next government? Or can it see which way the renewables wind is blowing, and sail with it?

The public will no longer put up with higher energy costs and the destruction of the British steel industry

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/01/glory-days-of-net-zero-are-thankfully-over-labour-climate/

Does anyone remember the children’s game Mousetrap? The centrepiece was the careful construction of a clever but complex and rickety piece of machinery. When it was ready, you turned a crank, which pushed a lever, which pushed a stop sign into a boot, which kicked a bucket with a ball bearing in it, which ran down some stairs and bumped into a rod with a hand on it, which triggered a diver launching himself into a barrel, which knocked loose a suspended cage, which, finally – if it all worked – would fall on your opponent’s mouse and take it out of the game.

One has to wonder whether the inventor of Mousetrap had any later-life influence on electricity grid design. Today’s complex chain of grid management for renewables, the turning on and off of power as the wind blows, or doesn’t, or the sun shines, or doesn’t; the backup power stations standing ready, or not, to fill the gap; the crazy systems of payment and cross-subsidy, and the fine margins on which all this works – it’s all uncomfortably reminiscent of this childhood game.

And, as in the game, the Mousetrap grid doesn’t always work – as the unlucky citizens of Spain and Portugal discovered this week. Somewhere in all the complexity something went wrong, their power supply switched off, and the country discovered the hard way that modern countries can’t manage for long without electricity.

We are supposed to believe no one knows why. Well maybe. There’s no explanation yet from the government, but the Spanish media tell us some sort of shock to renewables supply disrupted the frequency and voltage parameters of the grid. The grid manager didn’t have enough reliable non-renewables on the system to balance the grid quickly – and so it tripped off.

If so, it is easy to see why the proponents of net zero might be reluctant to admit it. After all, critics of renewable energy have been highlighting exactly this risk for some time. We’ve learnt not to expect honesty and frankness from net zero advocates, and I fully expect the same thing this time around. But things are thankfully changing.

Despite the obfuscation, the message is beginning to get through to voters. Net zero means the highest energy costs in the developed world and the flight of productive industry; the destruction of the British steel industry; the vast fields of plastic enshrouding our countryside to capture our feeble sunlight; the marching armies of pylons needed to move energy from windfarm to grid; the continued high cost of electric cars – unless the Chinese dump them – and the risks they bring, seemingly leading the authorities to suspend EV charging in Parliament’s underground car park; the prospect of paying more for your electricity for having the temerity to live

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