Don’t strand Cambo until our energy future is secure

If the phrase ‘stranded asset’ hasn’t yet entered your vocabulary, here’s a useful example of what it means. The 178 million barrels of oil in the Cambo field west of Shetland may stay there for ever because of government shilly-shallying over whether and when to end exploitation of the UK’s remaining hydrocarbon resources — while we import equivalent volumes of oil or gas from the Middle East, Norway and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just to keep our lights on.

Shell — which had a 30 per cent interest in Cambo but is under pressure from shareholders, activists and regulators to accelerate its shift to cleaner energy — has pulled out of the project on the grounds of its ‘weak economic case’ and ‘potential for delays’, the latter obvious code for lack of faith in political support. Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, now power-sharing with the Green party, has said Cambo should not win approval from the UK Oil and Gas Authority (an agency of BEIS), having presumably calculated that she will look doubly virtuous if Whitehall ignores her and Scotland wins 1,000 new jobs from the go-ahead.