If the broadcaster and eco-warrior Chris Packham describes something as ‘an act of war against life on Earth’, sensible people might suspect that it’s probably, on balance, a good thing. Such is the case with the Rosebank field – the UK’s largest remaining undeveloped reserve of oil and gas, in deep waters west of Shetland, which was green-lighted by the government last week.

Leading this £3 billion project will be the Norwegian energy giant Equinor. Rosebank’s 69,000 barrels of oil per day will be shipped to Norway or elsewhere to be refined and sold into world markets. But its 44 million cubic feet of gas per day will be piped to the UK mainland, as a substitute for liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipped from global hot-spots, at least for as long as we still need gas for heating – a time horizon recently extended by Rishi Sunak’s backpedalling on the switch to electric heat pumps.

The Rosebank supply won’t make any difference to domestic energy bills. The good news, however, is that it is expected to have a ‘carbon intensity’ of just 12kg of CO2 per barrel equivalent (reduced to 3kg if the extraction process is itself powered by electricity) compared with an average of 79kg for imported LNG, which consumes huge volumes of energy in the liquefaction process.

Offered that comparison, Rosebank’s opponents argue that wherever the gas comes from, the burning of it by consumers generates another 320kg of CO2 per barrel equivalent. We can agree with them that all carbon-fuel usage should be replaced by nuclear, wind, solar and hydro as soon as science and investor appetite make that epochal shift feasible. But in the meantime, unless we want to tank the economy and freeze our toes off in the late 2030s, we should make the most of relatively clean and secure sources such as Rosebank. So let’s wish the Norwegians good drilling.

Green and ungreen

Having declared myself last week for scrapping HS2 – indeed, having suggested long ago that its unfinished tunnels would make excellent mushroom farms – I saw no point in attending the Tory conference where little else was discussed. Instead I took in a couple of discussions on the greatest obstacle to the net-zero transition so ardently desired by anti-Rosebankers – the scarcity and inaccessibility of the minerals required for electric-vehicle batteries and wind turbines.

The first presentation, by a company called Invinity Energy Systems, sang the praises of industrial-scale ‘vanadium flow’ batteries for efficient storage of power from wind and solar arrays; vanadium is a relatively abundant element, though its big producers include China and Russia. The second took a much wider view, contrasting the stranglehold of China on the likes of lithium and rare earths for use in its own industries against the multiple challenges faced by western natural resources companies: heavy regulation, lack of government support, the enfeebled state of the London stock exchange which used to be their chief source of capital, and the propensity of pension funds and other investors to shun them for tick-box environmental reasons.

The irony is that so many renewable and digital technologies depend on minerals that have to be hacked out of the earth and put through heavy industrial processes. To be green we also have to be ungreen, a fact that western democracies and their capital markets have yet to digest.

Wrong for the job

Dame Sharon White was unlucky ever to have been offered the chair of the John Lewis Partnership. A former Treasury high flyer and head of the media regulator Ofcom, regularly named as one of Britain’s most influential black women, she was a platinum member of Whitehall’s establishment who might have cruised on via a couple more quango roles to the headship of an Oxbridge college.

As it was, she took on in 2020 a fiercely difficult role in the retail sector, of which she had no experience. Her task was to protect the treasured John Lewis and Waitrose employee-ownership model against discount and online competition, while also finding ways to fund continuing expansion and renewal.

Rumours that she might contemplate diluting the mutual structure fell on such stony ground that she barely survived a vote of no confidence, and now she has announced her departure in 2025, after spending just five years in the post. Commentators are already calling for ‘a real retailer’ to replace her but for once I won’t propose the maverick sportswear tycoon Mike Ashley, who would be as wrong for the job as Dame Sharon is. Let me instead lob in the name of Julian Richer, the hi-fi seller turned philanthropist who recently gave 60 per cent of his business to its staff: he’d be the struggling partnership’s ideal reinvigorator.

Pleasing the customer

The annual tour to meet finalists for our Economic Innovator of the Year Awards was as uplifting as ever. More than 40 entrepreneurs in sectors ranging from graphene technology to bamboo-based loo paper came to pitch to us. We admired their passionate commitment and their quest for product perfection – and we’ll announce the winners next month.

Meanwhile, lessons were also offered by the venues for our lunches. The Ivy (Manchester) and Ivy Asia (Leeds) are part of a remarkable brand expansion by the hospitality maestro Richard Caring: camper, slicker and a lot more fun than the original Ivy in London’s West End. Gleneagles Townhouse (Edinburgh) is a handsome re-purposing of the seat of the long-gone British Linen Bank, once Scotland’s third largest. Pasture (Bristol) deserved simple credit for greatly improved service this year compared with last. But the opposite was true of Marco Pierre White Steakhouse (Birmingham), whose founder should sign on for a refresher course with Caring – or indeed with any of our Innovator finalists – in how to perfect the product and please the customer.