Miliband: You're "100% Wrong" If You Think North Sea Will Cut Energy Bills

Despite the fact it would boost domestic supply and cut reliance on expensive LNG imports

New drilling in the North Sea will not bring down energy bills, Ed Miliband has claimed, saying it will “make no difference” to prices and anyone who believes this is “100% wrong” – despite the fact it would dramatically boost domestic supply and cut reliance on expensive imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The Telegraph has more.

The Energy Secretary said ramping up efforts to extract oil and gas from UK waters would “make no difference” to household energy costs, stressing that anyone who believes this is “100% wrong”.

He told the BBC: “We’ve taken a pragmatic and, I believe, the right approach on the North Sea, which is to say we’re not going to issue licences to explore new fields, but we want existing oil and gas fields to be kept open for their lifetime.

“The only way we get energy security is with our mission for clean power.

“There’ll be some people who come and say the answer is ‘if we only drilled, we’d lower bills’. They’re 100% wrong.

“However much drilling we do in the North Sea, it doesn’t lower energy bills by one penny because prices are set on the international market.”

Miliband has sought to defend Labour’s ban on new North Sea drilling after Denmark reversed plans to close its 20-plus offshore fields by the early 2040s.

It made the move after warning that cutting fossil fuel production could undermine Europe’s energy security.

This has piled more pressure on Miliband, whose Net Zero agenda has been blamed for Britain paying some of the highest energy prices in the world.

Rachel Reeves has since tried to tackle high energy bills by overhauling green levies, which led to a fall in Ofgem’s latest price cap.

The regulator announced on Wednesday that annual energy bills will fall by £117 from April, which is less than the £150 discount Reeves had promised late last year.

Worth reading in full.

The Climate Skeptic‘s Ben Pile says Miliband is wrong “because there is no such thing as ‘international markets’”:

That’s why there’s as much as a 400% difference between the price of gas in the USA versus the UK. If there is scarcity in European markets (including the UK), it is because most of Europe followed the UK in restricting or even prohibiting gas extraction. This problem did momentarily surface in the USA at one point under Obama. And to stop the problem of prices rising and impacting industry, he simply restricted exports for a time. And that’s a second and third reason Miliband is wrong. We could do what Obama did, allow increased production here (including fracking, as Obama did, despite his green credentials) and keep gas in UK markets through export tariffs etc. Most of Europe meanwhile, especially Germany, increased its dependence on imports. Moreover, the Treasury would benefit from tariffs, whether or not they were increased to punish exports.