Some decisions tell us a great deal about what matters to a government: what its principles are and in which direction it is really travelling. Rosebank is one of them. 

The possible approval of this giant oil field, with the potential to produce 500 million barrels of oil, has long concerned many. Murmurings are that, after jumping through various regulatory hoops that it’s “on Grant Shapps’s desk”. Some thought the news would come last week, amidst the tidal wave of policies and documents that constituted the UK government’s ‘energy security day’.

It’s not just the fervent activists driving the Stop Rosebank campaign that are worried: it’s also Ed Miliband, shadow climate secretary,  and scientists, hundreds of whom signed a letter last week calling on Rishi Sunak to halt the licensing of new oil and gas developments.

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We should all, in fact, be worried. Chiefly, we should be concerned because of the carbon emissions from this field that could produce 69,000 barrels of oil and 44 million cubic feet of gas per day. If we were to use all the oil in that one field, according to analysis by the campaigning group Uplift, the emissions would blow the UK carbon budget for oil and gas production, from 2028 onwards.

How can we justify this, particularly when the United Nations has said that new oil and gas developments are incompatible with a 1.5C pathway? Do we think we are some special case?

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The only possible defence, bogus as it is, would be that the emissions from such a field could be mitigated through carbon capture.  So it was no surprise to find that carbon capture investment was the big headline of this new strategy. It was as if we were being set up for a world in which we keep on extracting oil.

But while carbon capture does seem an important technology to develop for hard-to-abate industries, we need to quash this story that we can just keep on burning fossil fuels because somehow we’ll learn to capture it. Last week Chris Skidmore, the Chair of the UK's Net Zero Review, described the idea that carbon capture can be used to mask the future production of fossil fuels as a "false narrative". 

“I think it’s really important," he said, "that we shouldn’t be conflating the two... The UN and the International Energy Agency have both said we’re going to have to have carbon capture if we want to have net zero, but that should be for existing industries – hard to decarbonise industries that exist at the moment."

He added: "There is no such thing as a new net zero oil field. It’s simply not possible to achieve our net zero commitments by opening up new oil fields.”

It's worrying therefore when we see this promotion of carbon capture alongside a Powering Up Britain plan with so much pro-oil content, one that has said it will respect “the vital role that UK oil and gas will play in the transition” and that the North Sea Transition Authority (the former Oil and Gas Authority) will continue to “maximise” offshore oil and gas production in UK waters.

But there are other reasons to be worried about Rosebank. The UK Government is set to put up 90 percent of the cost of this field, amounting to £3.75 billion; meanwhile its developer, Equinor, Norway’s state-owned energy company, will pay just £350 million.

This is due to Rishi Sunak’s “super-deduction” investment allowance which means for £1 spent in “UK extraction” up to 91% of the costs will be covered by the tax saving

And then there’s also the question of whether this particular field really would deliver on energy security – and if it could ever deserve a mention on a policy announcement under the name ‘energy security day’.

For, Rosebank doesn't offer security in the ways that matter to most of us right now in the continuing grip of a gas price crisis. The majority of its bounty would be light crude oil, not gas, and, if it were to follow the pattern of 80 percent of North Sea oil, it would be put on tankers for refining overseas and exported.

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So, we sit and wait for the news on Rosebank. And, as we wait, it's worth examining the priorities we have seen overall in the UK strategy.  While carbon capture and storage and nuclear power were headline strategies, there was a conspicuous failure to unblock onshore wind development and a lack of a profound shift in insulation and energy efficiency funding. 

These tell us something about UK power policy. Rosebank’s approval, if it happens, will be the final piece of the jigsaw, the one that shows how much of this is really just about keeping oil and gas happy, able to make profit, and in control.