Kemi Badenoch has pledged to extract every last molecule of oil and gas from the UK North Sea, as the Conservative party seeks to distance itself from its previous support for net zero and to attack Labour for rising energy bills.
The Conservative party leader said the North Sea Transition Authority regulator would be rebranded to the North Sea Authority under a Tory government, with environmental regulations slashed in favour of a single mandate to “maximise the extraction of our oil and gas”.
Badenoch said the UK’s move away from oil and gas extraction was a “unilateral act of economic disarmament”, adding it was “absurd” the country was “leaving vital resources untapped whilst neighbours like Norway extract them from the same seabed”.
“A future Conservative government will scrap all mandates for the North Sea beyond maximising extraction,” Badenoch said. “It is time that common sense, economic growth and our national interest came first . . . We are going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea.”
Badenoch’s statement, which comes ahead of a speech at a major oil and gas conference in Aberdeen on Tuesday, marks a significant departure from the previous Conservative government that hosted UN Climate Talks in Glasgow four years ago.
Badenoch has already described reaching net zero emissions by 2050 as fanciful despite the policy becoming law under the previous Conservative government in 2019, and her latest pivot seeks to tap into growing discontent over rising energy bills.
The Tory position stands in stark contrast to the Labour government that has vowed to end new licences for oil and gas exploration, arguing they are not compatible with the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming and that they would not lower prices.
Badenoch’s move comes as the Conservative party is trailing Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK and the ruling Labour party in the polls.
Badenoch, whose position as leader is widely seen as vulnerable less than a year after she took over from Rishi Sunak, has been attempting to stake out a series of more conservative economic positions at a time of concerns over slow growth, rising government debt and higher energy bills.
Ed Miliband, energy secretary, has pledged to make the UK’s electricity supply carbon neutral by 2030, which would require huge investment in upgrading the grid and technologies such as offshore wind and carbon capture, utilisation and storage.
Last week, Ofgem, the energy regulator, said the so-called price cap on household energy bills would rise this winter despite wholesale prices of natural gas falling.
Ofgem said higher prices for consumers were being driven by increasing transportation costs and support for other government schemes.
The UK oil and gas sector boomed in the 1980s helping fund Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the UK economy. While production peaked more than two decades ago, the industry has warned government policies are accelerating the drop in output from higher taxes to tight restrictions on developments.
Badenoch said the energy crisis, which started with Russia disrupting gas supplies ahead of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “underscored that our energy supplies are a matter of national security”.
She argued that the UK had already cut carbon emissions faster “than every other major economy since 1990” and blamed that for higher energy prices in the UK.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said it remained focused on “delivering the manifesto commitment to not issue new licences to explore new fields”, arguing new discoveries would “not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”.
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