Planning permission for expansion at the UK’s second largest onshore oil producer has been formally rescinded in another casualty of the landmark Supreme Court judgement on climate emissions.

Consent for more drilling and production at the Wressle field near Scunthorpe was granted by North Lincolnshire Council on 13 September 2024. This was more than 12 weeks after the court’s ruling in the legal challenge brought by Sarah Finch.

The court case centred on whether planning decisions for onshore production should take into account carbon emissions from the burning of oil and gas, known as indirect, scope 3 or downstream emissions.

A majority of Supreme Court justices ruled on 20 June 2024 that environmental impact assessments that accompany planning applications for onshore production should take into account these emissions, as well as emissions from the production process.

In the Wressle case, North Lincolnshire Council had not considered the likely scope 3 emissions when it granted planning permission.

Union Jack Oil, which has a 40% stake in the Wressle site, said in a statement today the operator, Egdon Resources UK Limited, would now analyse scope 3 emissions arising from the planned expansion. The company would also ask the council to decide whether an environmental impact assessment was needed for the proposals.

Union Jack said:

“Depending on the outcome of this [EIA] decision, a new determination of the Wressle planning application will be made.”

This would be based on either the existing information or the findings of a new EIA, Union Jack said.

Today’s announcement does not affect the planning permission for production from existing well at Wressle.

The site produced 1,884m3 in August, the most recent data publicly available. This amounts to 3.25% of UK onshore oil. 78% of UK onshore oil is from the Wytch Farm field in Dorset.

DrillOrDrop has closed the comments section on this and future articles. We are doing this because of the risk of liability for copyright infringement in comments. We still want to hear about your reaction to DrillOrDrop articles. You can contact us by clicking here.