The Iran war has spurred a range of commentators to renew calls for the UK government to issue new licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

They argue that new domestic drilling could boost energy security at a time of volatility in major oil-and-gas producing countries in the Middle East.

However, such arguments overlook that the North Sea basin is in long-term decline and issuing new licences would only make a fractional difference to new production.

Carbon Brief analysis shows that the UK’s gas production in the North Sea is set to drop 99% by 2050, when compared to 2025 levels, with new licences pushing this figure down only slightly to 97%. (Oil production is also in long-term decline.)

Additionally, the analysis shows that the continued expansion of renewables and low-carbon technologies offers far greater protection against volatile gas imports than new domestic drilling.

The chart below shows how the roughly 15 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar power secured in the latest UK renewable-energy auction will avoid the need to import 78 “Q-Flex” tankers full of liquified natural gas (LNG) each year by 2030. This gas would cost roughly £4bn at current prices, which stood at 126p per therm as of 11 March.

(Gas can be either transported via pipelines or compressed into LNG and shipped across oceans, as is the case for gas coming into the UK from the US, Qatar or Algeria, for example.)

This is nearly six times more than the extra domestic gas production in 2030 if new licences are issued for North Sea drilling, according to Carbon Brief analysis of data from the UK government’s North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA).

Moreover, the 15GW of new renewables were secured in a single auction round. Another auction, likely to add significantly to this tally, is due to take place later in 2026.

Industry sources often stress the potential for the discovery of new North Sea reserves in the future. But, even if such discoveries were to materialise, they would take many years to start yielding gas, even as the UK moves away from fossil fuels altogether. 

Other measures, such as replacing millions of gas boilers with heat pumps, would also be more effective at curbing the UK’s reliance on imports of foreign gas, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Even changes to people’s behaviour, such as adjusting the “flow temperature” on gas boilers to save energy while maintaining comfort levels, would reduce gas demand significantly, if performed at scale.

The opposition Conservatives and the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party have called for more drilling in the North Sea. At the same time, they have pledged to end support for renewables, heat pumps and the UK’s legally binding target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, which was legislated by the Conservatives in 2019.

Carbon Brief’s analysis shows that this combination of actions – issuing new licenses for the North Sea while rolling back climate policies – would be very likely to increase the UK’s dependence on imported gas, rather than to reduce it.

(This is in line with analysis from the National Energy System Operator, NESO, which found that reaching the UK’s net-zero target would cut fossil-fuel imports, relative to a scenario that rowed back on climate action while boosting domestic fossil-fuel production.)

Industry lobby group Offshore Energies UK has commissioned statistical modelling that it says shows that more oil and gas could still be extracted from the North Sea than expected by the NSTA, if the government were to make various policy changes.

However, this modelling still shows a rapid decline in North Sea production.

After decades of drilling, the majority of reserves left in the North Sea are oil. Around 80% of oil produced in UK waters is currently exported to the global market.

The UN Emissions Gap Report in 2023 said that the coal, oil and gas extracted over the lifetime of producing and under-construction mines and fields, as of 2018, “would emit more than 3.5 times the carbon budget available” for meeting the Paris Agreement’s aspirational target of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

At the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November 2025, the UK joined a group of more than 80 countries in calling for a global phaseout of fossil fuels.

Methodology

This analysis is based on additional UK domestic gas production or reduced gas demand in 2030 and is measured in terms of the number of LNG tanker deliveries avoided.

The estimate of additional gas production in 2030 is taken from the NSTA projections published in February 2026. The extra output is from NSTA’s “illustrative” estimates for the development of “undeveloped discoveries” and “future discoveries”.

The gas demand avoided by new wind and solar is based on the latest “AR7” auction for new renewables, the results of which were announced in early 2026. It assumes that offshore wind operates with a “load factor” of 50%, onshore wind at 36% and solar at 12%. The avoided gas demand is based on replacing gas-fired electricity generation.

For heat pumps, the estimate assumes a typical home with a gas demand of 11,500 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year, replacing an 85% efficient gas boiler with a 300% efficient heat pump.

It assumes that the electricity to power these heat pumps is drawn from the average mix of electricity generation in 2030. It also assumes that the “carbon intensity” of generation – the emissions per unit of output – falls to 50g of carbon dioxide per kWh, implying that roughly 12% of electricity generation is from gas.

The amount of gas avoided by switching to heat pumps would be roughly halved if all of these heat pumps drew all of their electricity needs from gas-fired power stations.

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