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As the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz crisis have driven fresh panic about energy security, a familiar set of voices has moved quickly to turn that fear into a renewed case for more North Sea drilling. But the institutions leading the charge have deep financial and institutional ties to the fossil fuel industry.
A Byline Times investigation reveals how the rest of the press has largely failed to reveal these conflicts of interest – despite the claims being contradicted by official data from the North Sea oil industry.
The Lobby
On the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, Andy Critchlow argued that Britain’s retreat from the North Sea amounted to “economic self-harm”. Critchlow was described as an ‘energy supply expert’, but he is actually head of news at S&P Global, the oil-and-gas pricing and conference business that runs CERAWeek – Big Oil’s global energy summit – and which provides data to the Secretariat for OPEC, the consortium of massive oil producers dominated by the Gulf regimes.
S&P Global’s vice chairman Daniel Yergin, who chairs CERAWeek, has for years advanced an “energy addition” thesis – the view that renewables are being layered on top of fossil fuels rather than displacing them.
A similar line was pushed weeks before the war by the Tony Blair Institute, which declared that allowing UK oil and gas production to fall faster than demand would increase Britain’s exposure to international markets and geopolitical risk.
The new report drove big headlines in Bloomberg, Politico, Telegraph, The Times and Financial Times. However, they mostly failed to inform their readers that TBI has received funding from Gulf oil producers, chiefly the Saudi Government, and advised the UAE Government, or that Blair has personally consulted for Gulf petrostate interests and spent much of his time as prime minister promoting British Petroleum (BP).
The same pattern holds at the Tufton Street based Institute of Economic Affairs, which in a February 2026 paper announced that meeting Britain’s oil and gas needs through imports would be more environmentally harmful than domestic production, and called for repeal of the Energy Profits Levy and continued development of North Sea resources.
The same IEA received more than £640,000 from fossil fuel companies and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire between 1957 and 2005, including substantial funding from BP, Shell and Esso; and has been funded by BP every year from 1967 to 2018. Yet that tidbit was excluded in the amplification the IEA paper received from the Telegraph, Daily Express, GB News, and The Critic.
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What the Official Data Actually Shows
Even where media coverage did cite some criticisms of these claims, it largely failed to lay bare the fundamental data sleights-of-hand at play.
Proponents of new drilling frequently cite “20 billion barrels” remaining under the North Sea. That figure collapses different categories into one politically convenient soundbite. In reality, the North Sea Transition Authority puts proven and probable reserves at 2.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent – not 20 billion.
To reach the higher figure requires adding contingent and highly uncertain prospective resources, volumes that might never be commercially viable for production.
The North Sea basin is “mature”, most accessible oil and gas has already been extracted, and production has been naturally declining for 25 years. The vast majority of future production is expected to come from fields already producing or being developed. Further licensing will not reverse this natural decline – and the data on new licences awarded in the last decade shows it has only made an “incremental difference” to overall production.
Even Offshore Energies UK’s (OEUK) own 2025 forecast concedes the point. It projected a 3% rise in production in 2025. After 2026, production is expected to enter a natural decline so steep that the widening gap between production and demand cannot be closed by new North Sea licensing.