CAPITAL $TRIKE

North Sea Oil Producers Warn of Mass Exodus

By Irina Slav - Aug 20, 2024, 

• UK oil and gas producers like Serica Energy are considering moving operations to countries with more stable tax regimes, such as Norway.
• The UK government's increased windfall profit taxes and removal of tax incentives are driving this exodus.
• This shift could lead to significant job losses and decreased energy security for the UK, as it becomes more reliant on energy imports.

The UK’s oil industry has had a tough few years. The future does not promise a change in a positive direction, either. It seems all hope for this has been lost, and some oil drillers are looking at other jurisdictions for their future survival.

This is certainly the case for Serica Energy, one of the biggest suppliers of oil and gas to the UK, operating fields in the North Sea. Once upon a time, the North Sea was one of the biggest oil- and gas-producing regions in the world.

Serica Energy chairman David Latin recently dropped what should have been a giant bomb for any government concerned with energy security. “The UK is now fiscally more unstable than almost anywhere else on the planet,” he said, as quoted by the Telegraph. “That means we are looking for new places to invest our money. And Norway is a place where potentially we could recreate our business model.”

The statement by Latin is nothing but a confirmation that a Labour government fixated on boosting the amount of wind and solar capacity in the country and funding this boost with oil and gas tax money is driving the industry away. Plans to further increase windfall profit taxes on the industry and the removal of a tax incentive that kept producers at home until the Keir Starmer government took over might prove the last nudge out the door.

There is also uncertainty about future energy policies that make North Sea oil and gas operators reluctant to invest in local production. 

“[Policy uncertainty] reduces our willingness to spend money to do things quickly because if we spend and the policy changes, then we have to start all over again,” the chairman of one relatively small producer, Ping Petroleum, told the Financial Times this week. “People are walking away from fields with significant reserves,” Robert Fisher said.

As Serica’s chairman suggests, those who are walking away from the British North Sea will probably find other places to invest their money. The British government, however, would be hard-placed to find another industry it could fleece that deeply and get away with it. And this is a big problem because Labour has promised a fast and ambitious transition to wind, solar, and hydrogen. And fast and ambitious costs more money than just one or the other.

The Financial Times reported that tax income from the oil and gas industry had reached close to 10 billion pounds last year, but the amount is set to drop off a cliff over the next five years to just above 2 billion pounds in 2028. This will not be enough to fund what the Labour government calls Great British Energy—the state-owned transition vehicle for financing the transition.

“If the government implements the kind of windfall taxes they are talking about, then you end up with a cliff edge in UK energy production because the industry will be taxed into uncompetitiveness,” Stifel analyst Chris Wheaton told the Financial Times. “That is going to cause a very dramatic decline in investment and therefore production and jobs, and a big hit to energy security.”

In other words, if oil and gas producers currently operating in the British section of the North Sea want to ensure their long-term survival, they’d better look for opportunities abroad. For Serica, Norway is the no-brainer destination. If it doesn’t work there, the company will look elsewhere, per its chairman. The important bit is that it will no longer supply oil and gas to the UK. And if others follow, there will be thousands of jobs lost, and the UK will, rather ironically, become even more dependent on energy imports.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com