The recently installed Labour administration in the UK has said that the previous Conservative administration had made an error in approving an offshore lease environmental impact assessment.
Only hours after the beginning of hearings on a court challenge to Equinor’s Rosebank lease on the UK continental shelf, the UK government said that the previous ad ministration had been in error when it approved Rosebank’s environmental impact assessment.
In a hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, government solicitor Chris Pirie said on Wednesday November 13th that assessments of the project’s impact had not incorporated evidence on “the effects on climate of the combustion of oil and gas to be extracted from the fields.”
The UK Supreme Court recently ruled that this greenhouse gas review is a requirement for new oil and gas lease evaluations. Environmental activist groups Greenpeace and Uplift argued that courts should also invalidate Rosebank’s impact assessment, because a full downstream emissions review was not done.
In court the government representative Pirie suggested that, should the court decide to intervene, the government would prefer to request an addendum to the existing environmental review for Rosebank, and then make a new decision on whether the project could proceed. He said that this would avoid the time and cost of starting over with a new review.
Lawyers for Shell’s Jackdaw project, which is a defendant in the same lawsuit, accepted that the previous government had made an error of law in granting an offshore lease without a full emissions review. However, the Shell legal representatives argued that the lease approval had been granted in good faith under the law as it was understood at the time, and that the projects might be suspended indefinitely if they were forced to undergo another round of permitting evaluation. Equinor is expected to make similar arguments.