Don’t strand Cambo until our energy future is secure

If the phrase ‘stranded asset’ hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary, here’s a useful example of what it means. The 178 million barrels of oil in the Cambo field west of Shetland may stay there for ever because of government shilly-shallying over whether and when to end exploitation of the UK’s remaining hydrocarbon resources — while we import equivalent volumes of oil or gas from the Middle East, Norway and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just to keep our lights on.

Shell — which had a 30 per cent interest in Cambo but is under pressure from shareholders, activists and regulators to accelerate its shift to cleaner energy — has pulled out of the project on the grounds of its ‘weak economic case’ and ‘potential for delays’, the latter obvious code for lack of faith in political support. Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, now power-sharing with the Green party, has said Cambo should not win approval from the UK Oil and Gas Authority (an agency of BEIS), having presumably calculated that she will look doubly virtuous if Whitehall ignores her and Scotland wins 1,000 new jobs from the go-ahead.

Meanwhile, the other 70 per cent of Cambo belongs to Siccar Point Energy, a company you’ve never heard of that’s backed by the private equity giants Blackstone and Bluewater. And as the Financial Times has pointed out, there’s growing uneasiness about ‘brown assets [becoming] private capital’s dirty secret’: that is, private investors less sensitive to political and media pressure buying up oil and gas projects with which public companies can no longer afford to be associated. In short — if this is how you see it — the planet still suffers while unseen actors reap the profits of sin.

Does that make an overwhelming case for stranding Cambo and other UK oil reserves in the hope of driving investment towards wind, tidal, solar and nuclear? You’d have to be a super-optimist to believe we can make that leap without a couple of decades of reliance on imported carbon fuel.