@mr_james_c @FormerylNurgle Just because something is played over and over again doesn’t make it correct or likely to be right although I appreciate the people ideologically wedded to something will clutch any straw.
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@FormerylNurgle Please feel free to have your preconceptions challenged:
x.com/EdConwaySky/st…
Ed Conway@EdConwaySky
📽️ From Donald Trump to Britain's wind power trade body, there's a growing coalition calling for more drilling in the North Sea. Raising the question: if we DID encourage more exploration, how much oil & gas could we actually get? Our MEGA primer on the North Sea👇 Ps it's longer than usual, but it turns out this topic has SO MANY misconceptions. Time to put some of them right. Let me know what you think
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"North Sea gas wouldn't meaningfully bring the price down because we're paying the global price."
This is a flat out lie and any journalist with a brain should be capable of pointing this out.
Faisal Islam@faisalislam
“A wake up call” the CEO of Britain’s biggest domestic energy firm told me last night about the possibility of long term impact to global gas and oil infrastructure… but he pointed to electrification as the main lesson, while domestic gas would be preferable to shipped gas: “wake-up call that gets us to electrify more of our economy and get more of our energy from homegrown sources.” "The irony is, right now, we're emailing millions of customers saying their energy prices are going to fall..." "You can't protect yourself against these global markets forever." "Traders are really worried about how long it's going to take these facilities to get back online." "Our electricity system's too inefficient. We need to reform that markets so that people get the benefits of our homegrown resources." “my own view is that shipping gas around the world is more inefficient and has more leaks of methane than if you use local gas. But we shouldn't kid ourselves. North Sea gas wouldn't meaningfully bring the price down because we're paying the global price. If we got more out of the North Sea, it would simply be sold to other countries at these very high prices or here at these high prices. And we can't kid ourselves we're going to be self-sufficient in gas again. What we can do is have a much cheaper approach to electricity than we have today. Our electricity system's too inefficient. We need to reform that markets so that people get the benefits of our homegrown resources.
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@EdConwaySky What about the Corn Laws? Weren’t they an import ban?
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🚨Clearly there's loads of news today so there's a chance this gets ignored but... it is a BIG deal.
Britain, the country that invented free trade as we know it, is raising steel tariffs to 50%.
Biggest tariffs since Brexit. A massively symbolic moment. news.sky.com/story/watershe…
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@aDissentient @KathrynPorter26 It’s a good point actually but then so is the point about the science of climate change: it doesn’t care about all the nonsense talked about fossil fuels ( or indeed the physics of grids) it will just keep getting hotter.
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@BradleyThomasUK Just to be clear are you saying take the carbon price off gas now during the crisis and then put it back on again after the crisis is over. Or are you just trying to get rid of the carbon tax?
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The Government could, if it had the will to, cut your bills by abolishing the carbon tax, but they’re making a conscious choice not to.
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Extracting from a mature basin requires investment and the technical expertise of the producers that have been painted as 'evil' in the UK.
Norway knows this. Despite the basin’s maturity, Norway never stopped drilling, averaging forty-five exploration wells annually.
In 2025, Norwegian production surged to its highest level since 2009 — the lucrative result of a record $24.68 billion investment that returned roughly $90 billion in exports. Today, the sector serves as the bedrock for 20% of Norway’s GDP and sustains 200,000 people.
Britain still has its own reserves. The collapse of British exploration is a policy-driven crisis, not a geological one. By suffocating North Sea producers with a 78% effective tax rate via the Energy Profits Levy, Britain rendered long-term capital investment impossible.
The result is a historic standstill. In 2025, for the first time in sixty years, not a single new exploration well was drilled in British waters.
Sky News@SkyNews
Not long ago, Britain was one of the world’s biggest oil producers, with revenues accounting for six percent of all government revenues in the mid-1980s. @EdConwaySky looks at how much oil and gas Britain could extract from the North Sea if it really wanted to. 🔗 trib.al/loV0rHu
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@JordanEVGuy Don’t get me wrong I think these are a good idea but I don’t think they work on all lamp posts because not all lamp posts are on the outer curb.
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This doesn’t look like much, but it changes everything.
What you’re looking at is an evpzee lamppost charger.
It is the smartest solution to one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption.
A standard street lamp, quietly turned into an EV charger.
No digging up roads, it is installed in just 30 minutes.
No huge infrastructure projects, a full street can be electrified in a matter of hours.
Manufactured and assembled in the UK and fully OCPP.
Using what’s already there.
For millions of people across the UK, especially those without driveways, this is the difference between “I can’t have an EV” and “actually…I can.”
It’s easy to overlook innovations like this because they’re not flashy.
No 350kW ultra-rapid chargers.
No massive charging hubs.
Just practical, scalable, everyday infrastructure doing exactly what it needs to do.
And that’s the point.
The EV transition will be be driven by everyone having the ability to charge when they need to.
Simple.
Effective.
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He’s not ignorant. He’s lying. That’s why he keeps aggressively cutting off the interviewer in order to stick to his prepackaged rhetorical scam, conflating international energy prices with domestic tax policy and additional costs.
These are not serious people. They are simply here to make things up and lie for the oligarchs.
If government tax decisions don’t make a difference, why not add a 1,000,000,000,000% tax? Wouldn’t that solve all our problems without raising the price of petrol?
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Miliband is dangerously ignorant. He denies that UK Government policy has driven up our energy costs. Listen to his delusions
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@ClaireCoutinho I expect in the ideologically driven fossil fuel world this has not been compulsory reading: smithschool.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/…
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This should be compulsory viewing for Labour MPs.
Their plans will leave us more reliant on dirtier imports of gas.
Less tax, fewer jobs, higher emissions.
All because of Ed Miliband’s nutty ideology.
Ed Conway@EdConwaySky
📽️ From Donald Trump to Britain's wind power trade body, there's a growing coalition calling for more drilling in the North Sea. Raising the question: if we DID encourage more exploration, how much oil & gas could we actually get? Our MEGA primer on the North Sea👇 Ps it's longer than usual, but it turns out this topic has SO MANY misconceptions. Time to put some of them right. Let me know what you think
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@david_duguid @skippyantom @EdConwaySky @theCCCuk I think an awful lot of money has probably gone into persuading people not to get heat pumps just so that this point can be made.
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@skippyantom @EdConwaySky @theCCCuk predict, even in their most ambitious #netzero pathway, that we’ll still be dependent on #oilandgas for at least 20% of our primary energy by 2050.
Most of the ‘100% #cleanenergy’ headlines we see relate to ONLY the generation of electricity. Not heating and transport.
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📽️ From Donald Trump to Britain's wind power trade body, there's a growing coalition calling for more drilling in the North Sea.
Raising the question: if we DID encourage more exploration, how much oil & gas could we actually get?
Our MEGA primer on the North Sea👇
Ps it's longer than usual, but it turns out this topic has SO MANY misconceptions. Time to put some of them right.
Let me know what you think
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@EndFuelPoverty @EdConwaySky Certainly “best case scenario” is doing some heavy lifting.
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Interesting that the coalition for more North Sea drilling includes Trump!
The Oxford Smith School found renewables save households ~£441/yr vs £16–82/yr from North Sea gas.
Dr Anupama Sen's work is clear: North Sea savings are "sheer fantasy" compared to renewables.
The numbers don't lie, the only lasting protection from volatile fossil fuel markets is clean, homegrown energy.
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@EdConwaySky I mean it may be a carbon saving for the UK (but not necessarily for the planet) but I’m not sure how much carbon goes into our account anyway given that liquefaction must take place elsewhere.
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@EdConwaySky Doesn’t the argument about lower carbon emissions presuppose that less LNG will be produced and burnt. But is that right? If LNG that would have come to UK just goes elsewhere, where’s the carbon saving?
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@BenGrahamUK Can you be more precise about when this blackout is going to be. Is it in the next few weeks, months, years, decades? It’s just that there have been scare stories about blackouts over the last few years and I wanted to make sure this isn’t one of them.
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Britain is sleepwalking into blackouts.
Wind & solar can’t carry a modern economy.
Nuclear and fossil fuels can.
This isn’t complicated.
Talk@TalkTV
"It's our patriotic duty to drill for oil and gas, it's common sense" Richard Tice MP reacts to the UK's Wind Farm Trade Body, telling Miliband to drill North Sea Oil. @TiceRichard
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@iealondon @mayerandrew This is quite Orwellian really: if the war proves anything it’s that it’s foolish to rely on oil and gas. But what do this bunch do? They turn that on its head and pretend it’s some sort of solution.
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💡 "Selling sunlight and breezes as free energy, without mentioning the cost of capturing, converting and backing them up, was always a catastrophic folly."
IEA's Energy Analyst @mayerandrew on Britain's energy crisis. 👇
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@mikegardner_wb As I understand it we’re not particularly reliant on tankers from the Gulf now but the fact that other countries are means that the global price goes up.
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If we’d exploited the North Sea, extracted our own shale gas and refined it here, we wouldn’t be reliant on tankers coming through the Straits of Hormuz.
Between them, in pursuit of their infantile net zero, the Conservatives and Labour have undermined our energy security.
Good Morning Britain@GMB
Petrol could be rationed and drivers could face speed restrictions if the war in Iran continues to impact oil and gas supplies, according to reports. Industry experts suggest ministers have been warned of a "significant shortfall" within 2 months. @LouisaJamesITV reports.
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Ed Miliband’s civil servants have predicted a decade or more of falling gas prices, undermining Labour’s key argument for ditching fossil fuels. A global glut of gas is set to bring prices down for years to come, according to a report from DESNZ. Moving to sources such as wind and solar threatens to lock in the UK’s already-high energy prices for years to come.
So why are we pushing for renewables? #CostOfNetZero
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@GBNEWS The does seem to be a logical problem here: if most of the cost of petrol at the pump is tax how is North Sea oil going to change that?
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@AndrewBowie_MP At best those are jobs for the next 20-30 years - hardly jobs of future.
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Reopen the North Sea.
Expand exploration.
Scrap the EPL.
Deliver energy security.
It’s that simple.
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@BenGrahamUK It seems as though, contrary to popular belief this volcano had a cooling effect but the temperature of the planet still went up. Does that not suggest something to you?
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2022: Hunga Tonga Hunga Haʻapai erupts causing a massive atmospheric blast.
Huge volumes of gases and CO₂ released naturally.
The climate system has always been shaped by forces far bigger than climate summits & net zero policies.
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@BenGrahamUK Time and money have been the problems with nuclear. It can’t be built fast enough to compete with renewables and it doesn’t seem to matter how much subsidy is given, it still can’t compete.
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If we went all in on nuclear power we would light every home in the UK using the lowest cost per unit of energy in the world.
Instead, we spent £700 million protecting fish at Hinkley Point.
Roughly £280,000 per fish.
You can’t build a serious energy system
when the country is run like this.
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