A campaign dedicated to Stop Rosebank.  Rosebank is a planned new oil field 80 miles off the Shetland coast in the North Atlantic. The UK government has approved Norwegian oil giant and Britain’s biggest gas supplier Equinor’s application to start developing the Rosebank oil field. At nearly 500m barrels,2 Rosebank is the UK’s biggest undeveloped oil and gas field – dwarfing the nearby Cambo oil field, which drew huge protests in 2021. Ninety percent of Rosebank’s reserves are oil, not gas. Like 80% of all North Sea oil,3 the majority of Rosebank’s oil is expected to be put in tankers and exported for refining overseas, with only some sold back to the UK at market price. Rosebank’s oil will not lower UK fuel bills.

The UK public, however, would carry almost all the costs of developing Rosebank. Thanks to the UK government’s oil and gas subsidies, the UK public would hand over roughly £3 billion in tax breaks to Rosebank’s owners just to develop the field. Burning Rosebank’s oil and gas would produce over 200 million tonnes of CO2.5 To put this into context, the climate pollution from Rosebank’s reserves would be more than the combined annual CO2 emissions of all 28 low-income countries in the world, including Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique. In other words, emissions from this one UK field would be more than those created by the 700 million people in the world’s poorest countries in a year. These are among the same countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis but are already experiencing the worst impacts of a warming planet. The emissions created just from extracting the oil from Rosebank would see the oil and gas industry blow past emissions reductions targets.

Rosebank’s development could also harm our seas and the diverse marine life they support: from delicate coral gardens to rare, deep sea sponges; from clams that live to hundreds of years old, to whales and dolphins. The development would see a pipeline laid through a protected area of the North Sea.