The nation's books

Wouldn't it be irresponsible for an independent Scotland to keep drilling for oil?

Q: Wouldn't it be irresponsible for an independent Scotland to keep drilling for oil?

It might be. It might not. That is exactly the argument a normal country has with itself, and Scotland has never been allowed to have it. Every licence, every tax rate and every field consent for the oil under Scottish waters is decided in London, where the policy has swung from 'hundreds of new licences' to 'no new licences' in a single year. Whatever pace of wind-down you think is responsible, the case for independence is the same: make it Scotland's decision.

The short answer

Maybe. Plenty of Scots think so, including plenty who will vote Yes. Plenty of others think a country importing three-fifths of its gas should keep producing its own while it still needs it. This page is not going to settle that for you.

What it will show you is this: the argument is being had everywhere except the place that owns the oil. Licensing, taxation and the consent for every new field are reserved to Westminster, where the policy has lurched from "hundreds of new licences" to "no new licences" in the space of a year, and where the two biggest undeveloped fields in Scottish waters have been waiting on a ministerial decision since a court quashed their consents in early 2025. Norway, Denmark and Ireland each faced the same question and each gave a different answer. All three answers were their own.

"Irresponsible" is a verdict on a decision. Scotland hasn't been allowed to make one.

Whose oil, whose decision

The geography first. Under the boundary the UK itself uses for statistics, Scottish waters produced 89% of UK North Sea revenue in 2024-25 (Scottish Government, GERS 2024-25). The regulator's latest count puts remaining proven and probable reserves at 2.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with a further 6.2 billion contingent and 4.6 billion prospective (North Sea Transition Authority, Reserves and Resources as at end 2024). It is a declining basin: production is projected to fall by around 7% a year for oil and 11% for gas to 2030, and by 89% by 2050 (Scottish Affairs Committee, October 2025). The question is not whether the North Sea winds down. It is how fast, on whose terms, and who plans for what comes after.

Every lever that answers that question is reserved. The Scottish Parliament does not licence exploration, does not consent fields, does not set the tax rate and cannot stop or start a single well. What Holyrood holds is planning onshore, skills, and a voice.

Three neighbours, three answers

Scotland is not the first small northern European country to face a barrel and a conscience at the same time.

	What they decided	Who decided
Norway	Keeps producing, while 96% of new cars sold in 2025 were fully electric and the oil money goes into a fund now worth over $2 trillion	Norway
Denmark	Cancelled its licensing round and set an end date for all North Sea production: 2050	Denmark
Ireland	Stopped accepting new exploration licence applications in 2019, and wrote the ban into law in 2021	Ireland
Scotland	Rosebank and Jackdaw await a decision	Westminster

(Norwegian Road Federation figures via just-auto, Norges Bank Investment Management, IEA policy database - Denmark's exploration ban, Irish Government - oil and gas exploration policy)

Notice what the table doesn't show: a right answer. Norway is regularly attacked by climate campaigners for continuing to drill, and in 2024 an Oslo court ruled three of its field approvals unlawful for ignoring the emissions from burning the oil, a case still working through the Norwegian courts (Climate Litigation Database - Greenpeace Nordic v Energy Ministry). Denmark's decision cost it revenue and jobs it chose to forgo. Ireland had far less to give up than either. Each of them weighed its own resources against its own climate law, in its own parliament, and can be voted out by its own citizens if they got it wrong. That is the whole of what independence would add to Scotland's oil: not a different answer, but the ability to give one.

What London has decided so far

If you want to know what "responsible" looks like from Westminster, the difficulty is that it changes with the weather.

In July 2023 the Prime Minister announced hundreds of new North Sea licences and a Bill to make licensing rounds compulsory every year (Euronews, House of Commons Library - Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill). A month earlier the Leader of the Opposition had promised, in Edinburgh, that his government would grant no licences to explore new fields at all (BBC News). Both were positions on Scotland's oil. Neither was put to Scotland.

The tax rate has moved just as freely. The Energy Profits Levy was introduced at 25% in May 2022, raised to 35% in January 2023, raised again to 38% from November 2024 and extended to 2030, taking the combined rate on North Sea profits to 78% (House of Commons Library - taxation of North Sea oil and gas, HM Treasury - Energy Profits Levy reforms). Investors in Aberdeen, and workers wondering whether to stay, have had four tax regimes in thirty months.

Then the courts. In January 2025 the Court of Session quashed the consents for the Rosebank oilfield and the Jackdaw gas field, both in Scottish waters, because their approvals had never assessed the emissions from burning what they would produce - the rule the UK Supreme Court had set in the Finch case the summer before (Burness Paull - Court of Session rules on Rosebank and Jackdaw, Brodies - Finch v Surrey County Council). New guidance followed in June 2025, the operators reapplied, the consultations closed in August 2026, and as this page went up the decision sat with a UK energy minister who would give the industry no particular deadline (BBC News, Energy Voice, 21 August 2026). A coalition of more than seventy Scottish organisations is urging refusal (LBC); the operators, who have reapplied, are urging approval. Both are lobbying a government that Scotland's voters did not choose and cannot remove.

You may think the right answer is yes. You may think it is no. Note that on the current arrangement your view, and the view of everyone in Scotland put together, is a consultation response.

The industry's case, and the answer to it

Since the page has asked you to hold both views in mind, here is the strongest version of each.

The case for producing runs like this. The UK imported 61% of its gas in 2024. Gas produced in UK waters carried an average footprint of 28 kg of CO2-equivalent per barrel; liquefied gas shipped in by tanker carried 85 kg, so LNG was 15% of supply but 46% of the emissions from supplying it (NSTA - emissions intensity of natural gas, September 2025). Production emissions from the UK's offshore industry fell 34% between 2018 and 2024 (NSTA Emissions Monitoring Report 2025). On this view, shutting the North Sea early while the country still burns gas doesn't cut emissions; it moves them onto a ship and adds some. (In fairness to the other side, the same NSTA figures show Norwegian pipeline gas at 8 kg, cleaner than Britain's own.)

The case against runs like this. The International Energy Agency's net zero pathway, published in 2021, contains no new oil and gas fields beyond those already committed (IEA, Net Zero by 2050). The barrel's own production footprint is a rounding error next to the carbon released when it is burned, which is why the courts now insist that burning be counted. Every new field is a bet that the world will still want its oil in the 2040s, and a signal to everyone else to make the same bet. On this view a wealthy country with the best wind resource in Europe has less excuse than most.

This page takes no side between them. You do not need to pick one to see the point: these are two serious, well-evidenced positions, held in Scotland by serious people, and the place where they are argued to a decision is not Scotland.

The barrel burns the same wherever it's pumped

Independence changes nothing about the physics. Oil from Scottish waters would warm the planet at exactly the same rate under a saltire. Scotland's climate record is not one to boast about either: it missed eight of its twelve annual emissions targets in as many years, was told by the UK's independent climate advisers in March 2024 that its 2030 goal was "no longer credible", and scrapped that goal later the same year (Climate Change Committee, Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2024). Those were devolved failures on devolved powers. A page that blamed London for them would be lying to you.

Nor does the Scottish Government have a settled view for a Yes vote to inherit. Its 2023 draft energy strategy carried a "presumption against new oil and gas exploration"; the final strategy has never been published. By June 2025 its Climate Action Minister was calling on the UK Government to end the Energy Profits Levy and to decide licensing "case by case" (The Ferret, Scottish Government ministerial statement, 3 June 2025). Polling suggests most Scots want to move away from oil and gas over time (The Scotsman); the independence movement contains people who would shut the basin faster than Denmark and people who would licence like Norway. A vote for independence is not a vote for either. It is a vote to have that fight in a parliament that can actually act on the result.

What is already happening to Aberdeen

The wind-down is not a future event for the city that hosts the industry. It is the last decade.

Aberdeen is one of only two cities in the UK with fewer jobs in 2023 than in 2010. Between 2010 and 2021 its number of 20 to 29 year olds fell by 16%, real household disposable income fell by 6.7%, and between 2014 and 2022 the value of its homes fell by 15% (Centre for Cities, January 2024). EY's 2025 forecast puts Aberdeen's growth to 2028 at 0.9% a year, the lowest of any UK city, and names the causes: the contraction of the energy sector and the uncertainty around the UK's energy policy, including the windfall tax extension, which it says has dampened investment and business confidence (EY forecast, via Scottish Financial News).

The next five years are modelled, and the range is wide. Robert Gordon University puts Scotland's offshore energy workforce at 75,000 in 2024 and projects it at somewhere between 45,000 and 63,000 by the early 2030s. In the lower case that is roughly 400 jobs, a Grangemouth refinery's worth, every fortnight for five years. The higher case needs two things at once: a much faster offshore wind build-out, and oil and gas activity sustained for longer under policies the report says would mirror "Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands" (Robert Gordon University, June 2025). Three countries, in other words, that run their own oil policy.

Which outcome Aberdeen gets depends on licensing, tax, grid investment and the auctions that decide which wind farms get built. Not one of those is decided in Scotland.

The transition nobody is running

There is one more thing the climate-minded reader should weigh, because it cuts their way.

Around 66,000 Scottish jobs depend on oil and gas, about one worker in thirty nationally and one in six in the north-east. Between 2016 and 2024 the UK offshore workforce shrank from 190,700 to 115,000, and the Scottish Affairs Committee found that "clean energy jobs are not being created at the pace or the scale required to match the job losses" (Scottish Affairs Committee, October 2025). Scotland's own Just Transition Commission put it more bluntly in May 2025: "the current path is not delivering a just transition", and without "urgent and ambitious action, investment and government leadership" the offshore transition "will not take place fairly" (Just Transition Commission).

Read what the Commission asks for and you will find the problem in its structure: the Scottish Government is told to plan regionally and fix skills, the UK Government is told to fix licensing, tax and the jobs gap, and both are told to work "closely and rapidly" together. The levers a transition needs are split down the middle between two governments that campaign against each other. Half a toolkit each is how you get decline with a nicer name - the story told on our Grangemouth page - and decline is not decarbonisation. The welders, divers and engineers who could build Scotland's offshore wind industry are the same people currently being made redundant from oil, and nobody with all the powers is in charge of the handover.

The fastest responsible wind-down anyone has designed still needs a plan, a fund and a government that answers for it. That is what Denmark had. It is what Norway has. It is what Scotland, on the current arrangement, is not allowed.

So what's the real question?

Not whether the last barrel from Scottish waters should be pumped in 2040 or 2050, or not at all. That is a real argument, and an independent Scotland would have it out in the open, with parties contesting elections on the answer.

The real question is the one every page here ends on: who should decide? Today the answer is a government for which the north-east of Scotland is an electoral rounding error and the North Sea a Treasury line, whose two governing parties promised the industry everything and nothing within a single summer, and which will decide Rosebank and Jackdaw whenever it gets round to it. Scotland's climate law, Scotland's workers and Scotland's voters are all consultees.

Whatever you think a responsible oil policy looks like, you cannot get one from a country that isn't allowed to have a policy.

Take it with you

Facts for sharing - each button copies the line, with its source and a link back to this page.

Roughly nine-tenths of UK North Sea revenue comes from Scottish waters, and not one licensing, tax or field-consent decision about it is taken in Scotland (Scottish Government GERS 2024-25)
Norway keeps drilling and 96% of its new cars are electric. Denmark voted to stop by 2050. Ireland stopped issuing licences in 2019. Three small neighbours, three different answers, every one of them their own decision (Norwegian Road Federation; IEA; Irish Government)
In July 2023 the UK Government promised hundreds of new North Sea licences. A month earlier the opposition, now in government, promised none. Three years on, Rosebank and Jackdaw are still waiting on a decision in London, not Edinburgh (Euronews; BBC; Energy Voice, August 2026)
Scotland's own Just Transition Commission, May 2025: 'the current path is not delivering a just transition.' Around 66,000 Scottish jobs depend on the industry, and 75,000 UK offshore jobs went between 2016 and 2024 (Just Transition Commission; Scottish Affairs Committee)
Aberdeen is one of only two UK cities with fewer jobs in 2023 than in 2010, lost 16% of its twenty-somethings in a decade, and is forecast the lowest growth of any UK city to 2028. Every lever that decides its future is held in London (Centre for Cities; EY)