Yes, Burnham Is Eyeing North Sea Oil, But Not the Way You (or Trump) Think

Andy Burnham has become Prime Minister, and within hours Donald Trump has declared that Britain is about to get rich by drilling the North Sea. Burnham does look likely to approve more drilling. But what that amounts to is a long way from the “drill, baby, drill” free-for-all Trump has in mind — and from what most people picture when they hear it.

Trump’s claim rests on an instinct most people share: that pumping more of Britain’s own oil must leave Britain better off — cheaper energy, more money, a stronger hand against the rest of the world. It is the obvious reading. It is also wrong, and the reasons it is wrong are not complicated once the numbers are in front of you.

On 19 July 2026, hours before Burnham entered Downing Street, Trump posted the message above on Truth Social. He wrote that Aberdeen was “dancing in the streets,” that the North Sea holds “hundreds of years of Capacity left, with much not even found yet,” and that opening it would take the UK “from a Poverty Stricken Disaster, to one of the Richest Countries anywhere in the World.”

Burnham has said none of this. According to reporting by Bloomberg, carried by City AM, his team has asked civil servants to draw up plans to approve two specific projects off the Scottish coast — the Jackdaw gas field and the Rosebank oil field — alongside an expansion of “tie-backs,” meaning extra wells drilled near existing platforms. The ground had been prepared under Labour already: Rachel Reeves, then chancellor, said in April she would be “very happy” to back both. Burnham has made no public statement about opening up the basin “all the way,” and no final decision has been announced.

So Trump is right that more drilling is coming. What he has wrong is nearly everything about what it will do. Here is the case in plain English, with the evidence set out so you can weigh it for yourself.

What “drilling the North Sea” actually means

The first thing to understand is how narrow the real decision is.

Jackdaw and Rosebank are not new discoveries and not a new licensing round. Jackdaw, a Shell gas field about 150 miles east of Aberdeen, was licensed in 2022. Rosebank, north-west of Shetland and operated by a Shell–Equinor venture, was licensed in 2023. Both were granted under the previous Conservative government. That distinction is doing a lot of work: Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised not to issue new exploration licences, so approving two fields that were already licensed lets Burnham say he is keeping that promise while still allowing drilling.

The projects are stalled for a specific reason. In 2024 the Supreme Court, in a case known as Finch v Surrey County Council, ruled that an environmental assessment for a drilling project must count the emissions from burning the oil and gas, not just the emissions from extracting it. Because the original Jackdaw and Rosebank approvals had not done that, the courts quashed them. To restart the fields, the developers have had to submit fresh environmental assessments covering those “downstream” emissions, and the government has had to run public consultations on them.

That is why a Prime Minister cannot simply switch the North Sea back on. The decision sits with the Energy Secretary — now Miatta Fahnbulleh, after Burnham moved Ed Miliband, the architect of the no-new-licences policy, to the Foreign Office — working with the industry regulator. Any consent has to be consistent with the UK’s legally binding climate targets, and any decision can be challenged again in court. The consultations now under way must run their course before approval is even possible.

Trump is right that more drilling is coming. What he has wrong is nearly everything about what it will do.

Even taken at face value, this is a decision about two fields and some extra wells near existing kit. It is not “hundreds of years” of new supply, and it is not a lever that turns a country’s fortunes around. To see why, it helps to know how oil is actually sold.

What an oil field is, in plain terms

Start with what is down there. An oil field is a pocket of oil or gas trapped in rock, deep beneath the seabed. A company buys a licence from the government, drills a well, and pumps the oil to the surface. So far the instinct holds: it is British oil, from British waters.

Here is where it breaks. The company that pumps the oil does not have to sell it to British drivers, and it does not. Oil is bought and sold on a single world market, at one world price. A barrel from the North Sea fetches the same as a barrel from Texas or Saudi Arabia, give or take a little for quality and shipping. In practice, about 80% of the oil pumped from UK waters is already exported, because British refineries are built for a different, lighter grade of crude. Only about 8% of the oil refined in UK plants in 2024 came from our own waters.

Gas works much the same way. UK gas trades on a market that moves in step with the European price, and our pipelines run straight to Norway and the Continent. Pump more of it and it sells at the going European rate, not at a special British discount.

That single fact — one world price, not a home price — is what most of Trump’s claim runs aground on.

Why drilling more won’t cut your energy bill

If more British oil does not sell more cheaply to British buyers, then more drilling cannot, on its own, bring bills down. This is not a green talking point; it is the finding of the bodies that have studied it.

The Climate Change Committee, the government’s statutory adviser, told ministers that increased UK extraction “would not materially affect global oil or gas prices.” Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise modelled maximum extraction and found it could cut household bills by £16 to £82 a year. By contrast, decoupling electricity prices from the price of gas — a market reform, not a drilling decision — could cut bills by around £330 a year, three to four times more.

• £16–£82 A year off bills maximum North Sea extraction (Oxford Smith School)
• £330 A year off bills decoupling electricity from gas prices
• ~80% Of UK oil exported wrong grade for British refineries

The clearest test is Norway. It produces roughly twenty times more oil and gas per person than the UK, and owns its reserves through a state-controlled company. Yet in the winter of 2022, Norwegian households paid some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, because Norwegian gas sells into the European market at European prices. Producing your own does not shield you from the world price when the world sets the price.

”Hundreds of years left,” and other claims that don’t survive the data

Trump’s post makes three further claims worth checking against the figures.

On how much is left. The North Sea Transition Authority, the official regulator, publishes the reserves each year. As of the end of 2024 it counted about 2.9 billion barrels of proven and probable oil and gas, down from 3.3 billion a year earlier, against 47.7 billion already produced since the 1960s. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit puts it plainly: about 93% of the recoverable North Sea total has already been extracted. Production is running at roughly a million barrels a day and forecast to fall to 660,000 by 2029. “Hundreds of years of Capacity” is not what the regulator’s own numbers show; the basin is in structural decline.

On who gets rich. Britain does not own the oil. It owns the seabed, but once a licence is granted the oil and gas belong to whoever operates the field — BP, Shell, Equinor, Harbour Energy and others. The state takes its share through tax, and that share is shrinking as the basin empties: North Sea tax receipts fell to £4.5 billion in 2024/25 and are forecast at £2.7 billion for 2025/26, down from a peak of £12.4 billion in 2008/09. Norway banked its oil money in a sovereign wealth fund now worth over $2 trillion. Britain, which taxed rather than saved, did not. More drilling on a depleting field does not reverse that; the revenue trend is downward.

On the windmills. Trump wrote that the UK would “move the old and horrible looking windmills” that “loom over” Aberdeen. Nothing in the reporting on Burnham’s plans mentions removing wind turbines. Offshore wind is now the cheapest source of new power in Britain, and Aberdeen is the centre of the industry that is meant to replace oil and gas jobs as the basin runs down.

The strongest case for drilling anyway

The argument for more drilling is not empty, and it deserves its strongest form before the verdict.

There is real value left in the North Sea — billions in revenue and profit — and the question of who captures it is a fair one. Wind does not blow on demand and solar does not generate at night, so gas will be needed as a backup for years yet; a grid running mostly on renewables is a genuine engineering task, not a solved one. And the jobs case is the most serious of all. Robert Gordon University projects the oil and gas workforce will fall from 115,000 in 2024 to between 57,000 and 71,000 by the early 2030s. For Aberdeen, that is a hard decade whatever any government does.

There is also a narrow, defensible version of new production. Tie-backs to existing platforms — the very thing Burnham’s team is said to be preparing — can produce gas at lower emissions intensity than shipping in liquefied gas from abroad. On transition grounds, that is an argument worth taking seriously.

What none of this supports is the leap in Trump’s post: that opening the North Sea turns a “Poverty Stricken Disaster” into “one of the Richest Countries anywhere in the World.” The strongest case for drilling is about managing a decline and cushioning a workforce. It is not a case that Britain gets rich.

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Analysis

This section is the site’s own view, kept separate from the reporting above.

The gap between what Burnham is likely to do and what Trump says it means is the whole story. Approving Jackdaw and Rosebank, plus some tie-backs, is a modest and largely defensible decision about fields that were licensed years ago. Presenting it as a national transformation is not.

The reason bills stay high is not that Britain drills too little. It is that Britain’s power prices are chained to the global gas price, and that the country needs large volumes of oil and gas it can only buy at world rates. The route out is to need less of both — through electrified heating and transport, more clean generation, and enough storage and interconnection to ride out the days the wind drops. Every unit of energy the country does not have to buy on a volatile world market is a unit of genuine security. Chasing the last barrels of a depleted basin buys almost none.

Burnham may well approve more drilling. But the decision on the table — two fields licensed years ago, plus tie-backs, bound by climate law and open to legal challenge — is a far narrower thing than the transformation Trump described. His post reads a modest and contested policy call as a national turnaround. On reserves, on prices and on who owns the oil, the figures point the other way.

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Sources and further reading

• North Sea Transition Authority, annual reserves and production figures (end-2024).
• Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, analysis of cumulative North Sea depletion (~93%).
• Climate Change Committee, advice to government on UK extraction and global prices.
• Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, modelling of North Sea extraction versus renewables (2026).
• Robert Gordon University, projections of the UK oil and gas workforce to the early 2030s.
• Institute for Government, Jackdaw and Rosebank explainer (legal status and the Finch v Surrey ruling).
• City AM, Burnham to approve North Sea oil and gas drilling in policy blitz (Bloomberg reporting).
• BusinessGreen, Miatta Fahnbulleh appointed Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.
• CNBC, Burnham becomes PM as Trump slams Britain a ‘Poverty Stricken Disaster’.
• HMRC and Office for Budget Responsibility, North Sea tax receipts.