British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with oil and gas industry leaders on Monday to discuss his country’s energy security as it looks to move away from Russian hydrocarbons following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Boris said the oil and gas industry has an important part to play in producing the energy needed to move away from Russian hydrocarbons and transition to sustainable energy.
“We’ll continue to back them in building up our domestic energy security, where neither the U.K. nor our allies can be blackmailed by the likes of Putin, and in accelerating some of the solutions we need to reach net-zero, from low-carbon hydrogen to carbon capture and storage,” Johnson said.
At the roundtable meeting, Johnson and CEOs discussed increasing investment in the North Sea oil and gas industry and boosting the supply of domestic gas. Proposals included ways the U.K. can remove barriers facing investors and developers and help projects come online more quickly.
The U.K. said last week it would phase out oil imports from Russia, which account for around 8% of the country’s oil supply. The U.K.’s European allies are anticipated to have a tougher time weening themselves off Russia’s oil, given their great reliance on imports.
Monday’s roundtable meeting comes as other nations have been scrambled to overhaul their energy policies amid the war in Ukraine that has sent oil prices surging.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been slowly attempting to mend fences with traditional U.S. adversaries like Venezuela while forging ahead with green initiatives in the U.S.
Speaking at a fundraiser focused on climate Monday night, Biden said the Russia-Ukraine war was “another reason why we have to get off our dependency on fossil fuels.”
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“Imagine where we’d be right now if in fact, Europe was in fact energy free of fossil fuels,” the president said.
Biden has been blaming Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for high gas prices Americans are suffering, but prices had been rising for a year prior to that invasion. He authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the National Strategic Reserve in November 2021 in an attempt to alleviate increasing gas prices, months before Russia invaded Ukraine.
He has yet to meet with American energy industry leaders despite suggesting that they, too, are to blame for surging pain at the pump.
