A total of 24 licenses have been offered to 17 companies in the second tranche of the 33rd oil and gas licensing round, UK oil and gas regulator the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) revealed in a release sent to Rigzone recently.
Shell, Equinor, BP, Total, and NEO are among those companies, the NSTA highlighted. The 74 blocks and part-blocks offered in the tranche are all in the Central North Sea, Northern North Sea, and West of Shetland areas, the NSTA revealed.
The latest awards follow the 27 licenses offered in the first tranche of the 33rd oil and gas licensing round back in October 2023, the NSTA pointed out. The regulator, which noted in the release that the latest awards will help to ensure job security and provide benefits to the local and wider economy, outlined that more awards will follow “in the coming months”.
“This latest batch brings total offers so far to 51, with more to come once the appropriate environmental checks are complete,” an NSTA spokesperson said in the release.
“These licenses have the potential to make a significant contribution to the UK in energy production and economic benefits, and the NSTA will work alongside the licensees to help bring them into production as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson added.
The Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, Graham Stuart, said in the release, “we will continue to need oil and gas over the coming decades, so it is common sense to make the most of our own resources – with domestically produced gas almost four times cleaner than importing liquefied natural gas from abroad”.
“These new licenses will strengthen our energy security now and into the future, while also helping boost our economy, by backing an industry that supports 200,000 jobs and is worth GBP 16 billion ($20.2 billion) each year,” Stuart added.
In a statement sent to Rigzone, industry body Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), said the award of new oil and gas licenses by the NSTA “has the potential to strengthen homegrown energy security as the sector continues its expansion in wind, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage”.
Offshore Energies UK CEO David Whitehouse said in the statement, “in this general election year, we face a choice – we can build a homegrown energy transition by backing our people, our offshore firms, and our world class supply chain, or we can import even more energy and fail to grow our new wind, hydrogen, and carbon capture industries”.
“Policy decisions made today will be felt for generations to come. Our energy security, economic growth, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in almost every parliamentary constituency up and down the UK are at stake,” he added.
“We all recognize that our energy mix must change and our sector is ramping up renewables and accelerating the drive to net zero. But this journey will take time. Meanwhile our North Sea basin is naturally declining,” he continued.
“We have over 280 oil and gas fields but by the end of the decade 180 of them will have stopped producing. We need the churn of licenses for an orderly transition that supports jobs and communities across the country and meets our energy needs,” Whitehouse went on to state.
The 33rd Licensing Round opened in October 2022 and the application window closed in January 2023. The NSTA highlighted in its release that 115 bids came in from 76 companies, which it said demonstrated “the ongoing appetite within industry to explore the UK Continental Shelf”.
The NSTA described the round in the release as a key part of its drive to support the oil and gas industry, “which currently contributes around three quarters of domestic energy needs and, according to official forecasts, will continue to do so even as demand is reduced”.
In its release, the NSTA noted that internal NSTA analysis show that the average time between licensing and first production is now close to five years.
To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com
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