The UK government has “misrepresented” the Climate Change Committee (CCC) by wrongly claiming it said we would need a quarter of our energy to come from fossil fuels by 2050, scientists have said.
In order to justify signing off new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, ministers have said the country will still require a quarter of its energy to come from gas in 2050, the year the UK is supposed to meet net zero.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) says this figure comes from the CCC, the government’s statutory advisory body, which has strongly advised against licensing new fossil fuels.
Claire Coutinho, the energy security and net zero secretary, said recently: “We will not play politics with our energy security. Even the independent CCC has said that in 2050, we will need oil and gas for a quarter of our energy.”
DESNZ confirmed to the Guardian that the figure often cited by the department came from the CCC’s sixth carbon budget.
When asked for its methodology – how it arrived at this figure from the CCC’s data – a department spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the CCC said: “The data is used from our sixth carbon budget but they used their own calculation to get to that.” It is understood the committee does not endorse the 25% figure.
Prof Michael Grubb, from University College London, said: “I cannot find any credible basis for the government’s claim – not in the CCC analysis, nor in any serious analysis of net zero scenarios.
“The government must explain where it got this claim from and – speaking as a former member of the CCC – I’d ask specifically for the government to justify its reference to CCC analysis. The fiscal fiasco last year showed the dangers of the government withholding rigorous analytic advice from its own official channels – major misrepresentation, if this is what it is, is just as bad, if not worse.”
Prof Sam Fankhauser, from the Smith School at the University of Oxford, said: “I have now looked at the sixth carbon budget advice and could not find an explicit reference to oil and gas use in 2050. So the 25% figure must have been derived indirectly. Hard to know how this was done.
“There are global (as opposed to UK) scenarios of course that have this sort of amount of oil and gas in them, but I’m not sure what we can derive from them for the UK.” Fankhauser’s calculations find that gas could make up to 15% of the energy mix.
Bob Ward, from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said the data did not show that the UK would still need a quarter of its energy from gas by 2050.
He said: “I can confirm that the CCC has never claimed that 25% of the UK’s energy will be generated from fossil fuels in 2050. It is difficult to know how the government has calculated this figure. It may have used the data table published by the CCC in December 2021, which includes information about energy demand for every year up to 2050 in its balanced net zero pathway.
“This is the CCC’s model, and one would have expected the government to have consulted the committee about the figure before circulating it. It is another example of the government failing to consult the experts.”
Sources at the CCC said they were conducting their own calculations and would be publishing these in due course, but that it was unlikely they would reach the same figure as the government.
A DESNZ spokesperson said: “It is a matter of public record that the CCC’s own data shows that by 2050 we will need oil and gas for around a quarter of our energy.”
