Francis Egan has over 40 years of experience in the onshore and offshore oil and gas industry. He says the “reckless”, “disgraceful” and “ludicrous” policies of successive UK governments are “straggling the British economy” and “sacrificing hundreds of thousands of jobs on the altar of net zero”.
Egan has worked as a engineer in the North Sea with both Marathon oil and BHP – and has vast experience across the global energy industry on both the production front-line and as a senior executive.
In this exclusive interview, Egan issues a no-holds barred warning that, as a result of over-regulation and high taxation, extremely expensive UK energy is resulting in lower energy usage and a dearth of domestic and international investment across multiple sectors, which in turn is causing economic stagnation and related fiscal and systemic weakness.
At the time of writing, the US and Iran are close to conflict. Brent crude is up 20pc over the last 10 weeks and global oil prices are at a seven-month high. Iran is one of the world’s top ten producers, often pumping over 4 million barrels per day, around 5pc of global production.
But what of Britain’s North Sea oil production? UK oil output is in long-term decline, but has in recent years gone into free fall. This has been at least partly driven by the “net zero” policies of successive Tory and Labour governments.
In the late 1990s, Britain produced 2.7 million barrels of oil per day – over 3 per cent of global production. By 2023, oil output had plunged to just 650,000 barrels, before falling sharply again in 2024 to 570,000 - a fifty year low.
In 2025, the Labour government banned the drilling of new North Sea wells. The oil and gas industry is now predicting a staggering 40pc drop this year in UK North Sea investment.
A big reason for Britain’s steep energy output decline over recent years is tax. Tory then Labour “net zero” policies mean oil producers pay no less than 78% tax on their profits – with that Energy Profits Levy or EPL due to stay in place until 2030.
But plunging production means actually tax revenues are also dropping like a stone – and Britain’s oil and gas industry workforce, over 400,000 ten years ago, is now barely a quarter of that.
Since 2012, Egan has been CEO of Cuadrilla – a company exploring the extraction of shale gas in the UK, a production process also currently banned.
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