Yesterday, the British Government announced a bailout of sorts for hapless Britons suffering under the sudden spike in energy costs: Fifty-three million pounds will be distributed to households to help them purchase fuel (of which a disproportionate seventeen million will be sent to families in Northern Ireland).
The funding will be made available, per Downing Street, to “low income families in rural areas who depend on heating oil to warm their homes”.
Of course, this is a transfer of funds from the taxpayer to the heating oil companies, via the poor homeowner as middleman: It is essentially the state buying oil at its most expensive, because the disadvantaged cannot afford it. The Irish Government will, one imagines, get around to doing something similar once the Ministers get back from their Saint Patrick’s Day galivants around the globe.
Of course, Ireland has its own oil reserves that it could tap: The Ballyroe Oil Field off County Cork is estimated to hold about 1.6billion barrels of oil, of which about 311 million barrels are recoverable using current technologies. 311 million barrels of oil at the current global market value of a barrel – $100 or there abouts – puts the value of the Barryroe oil at about thirty billion euros.
If you don’t think about money, and think instead about domestic supply, Ireland’s consumption of oil is reckoned by most global measurements to be around 150,000 barrels per day, meaning that at its lowest estimate, the Barryroe Oil field could deliver, by itself, at least six years of supply to Ireland.
Of course, the Ballyroe field, like almost all of Ireland’s untapped oil and gas reserves, cannot be accessed by law in accordance with this country’s climate action plan, and legislation enacted by the Green Party on its return to power in 2020 which effectively bans all new oil and gas exploration in Irish waters.
In Britain, the situation is the same: The Labour Government, upon taking power, and for reasons of climate policy, effectively copied the Irish law restricting new oil and gas licences. And their proven reserves are much larger than ours: North Sea oil and gas reserves approaching 10 billion barrels of oil or their gas equivalents. Both countries have decided, having listened for decades to Green campaigners, to “keep it in the ground”.
Go back to this report, from the Journal, in 2023:
European statistics agency Eurostat has said that approximately 45% of the nation’s energy comes from oil. While that percentage has reduced slightly in recent years, Ireland is still one of the most oil dependent countries in Europe, and all of it is imported.
Proponents of Barryroe say projects like it would reduce Ireland’s reliance on foreign fuels and help make our sources of energy more secure. However, industry figures have said the ‘mood music’ from the Irish government makes it hard for exploration firms to get funding, even when licences are already in place.
But there are serious misgivings from many quarters about developing an oil well as the effects of climate change become more apparent, despite claims of hypocrisy over how Ireland continues to import oil from abroad.
Of course, that article being from the Journal, it began thusly:
ONE OF THE great myths in Irish public life is that various governments have willingly thrown away the chance of making a fortune from oil and gas exploration
This is, of course, not a myth: In 2023, Barryroe Offshore Energy, the company that had the rights to develop the Barryroe field, was pushed into liquidation after Eamon Ryan refused them a licence to proceed with the project – citing, almost unbelievably, financial concerns about the viability of the field.
There’s an easy way to find out if – as the Journal said in 2023 – the Irish oil and gas reserves are a myth. That way is to give exploration companies licences to develop the Barryroe field, and other fields. If those licences are indeed economically unviable, then they will be nothing more than worthless pieces of paper that will lead to private sector bankruptcies at no cost to the state. If it is not a myth, then the country gets access to a vital energy resource.
In any case, it is impossible to take the Irish Government seriously on this when its official policy is that regardless of the scale or profitability of any Irish oil and gas reserves, those reserves should never be tapped anyway because of Climate Change. That decision to voluntarily impoverish ourselves is and should be, I think, seen in the light of the present energy crisis. Rather than paying Oil Companies a premium to import foreign oil for the Irish market, Ireland could be profiting from the global spike in oil prices.
Instead, we are suffering. And that, as so much else in the country, is an explicitly political choice based on green ideology, rather than economics.