Jackdaw boss warns of winter fuel shortages if gas field not approved

We need to rewrite as original SinCity Press journalism, preserving all facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly. Use professional journalism tone, vary sentence structure. Output only the rewritten article with no preface, commentary, notes. No reporter contact info, email, social media, publication credits. We must keep all facts exactly: numbers, quotes, dates, names. Must not change any factual content. We need to rewrite the article (which is basically a BBC article) in our own words but preserving facts and quotes exactly. So we need to keep quotes verbatim (including punctuation). Also keep numbers exactly as they appear. Ensure we keep all details: e.g., "Jackdaw field", "Adura CEO Neil McCulloch", "150 miles eastbound of Aberdeen", "6% of the UK's gas needs from 1 October", "£1.5bn", "2% of the country's yearly gas demand", "1.4m homes", etc. Also keep quotes like "If I were the head of government for energy security and net zero..." etc. Keep quotes exactly. We need to vary sentence structure, but not alter any factual content. We need to output only the rewritten article. Let's extract all facts and quotes. Original text includes many parts; we need to preserve all facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly. So we must not lose any piece of information. This is a lot. We need to rewrite the entire article but keep all details. We must be careful to keep quotes exactly as they appear, including any typographical errors? The original quotes have some odd phrasing due to OCR errors. We must preserve them exactly as given. For example: "The owners of the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea say it is "hyper critical" that the UK government approves production to avoid the risk of domestic supply shortages this winter." Actually the original: "The owners of the Jackdaw state level successful the North Sea accidental it is "hyper critical" that the UK authorities approves accumulation to debar the hazard of home proviso shortages this winter." This is garbled. We need to preserve exactly the text as given? The instruction: "Preserve all facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly." It does not require preserving the garbled OCR text; it says preserve facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly. The quotes are inside the article; we must preserve them exactly. The surrounding narrative can be rephrased but must keep facts. Thus we need to extract the correct factual statements from the garbled text. But we must be careful: The original text is messy; we need to interpret the intended meaning and preserve facts. However, the instruction says preserve facts exactly, not necessarily the exact wording if it's garbled? It says preserve all facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly. So we must be exact. The quotes themselves appear to have errors; we must preserve them exactly as they appear in the source? The source includes weird words like "state level", "successful", "accidental". Those are likely OCR errors. But they are part of the text; if we change them, we might be altering facts? They are not facts; they are just erroneous words. The instruction is ambiguous. Usually in such tasks, we keep the content but fix grammar? However they explicitly say preserve all facts, names, dates, numbers, and quotes exactly. That suggests we should not change any quoted text, but we can rewrite the rest. The garbled parts are not quotes; they are narrative. We could rewrite them into proper sentences while preserving the underlying facts. That seems acceptable. Thus we need to produce a coherent article with same facts. Let's extract facts: - Jackdaw gas field in North Sea, owned by Adura (joint venture Shell and Equinor). - Adura CEO Neil McCulloch speaking to BBC News at the site 150 miles east of Aberdeen. - He says the project is in its final stages and could supply 6% of UK's gas needs from 1 October. - The regulator (North Sea Transition Authority) is considering revised applications for production at Jackdaw and Adura's Rosebank oil field west of Shetland, after a court ruled that both had been unlawfully approved. - Environmental campaigners say this summer's deadly and record-breaking heatwaves show the need to tackle climate change by rejecting such projects. - McCulloch says with only about 8 days of gas storage, the UK would have limited options in the event of a "gas supply emergency". - This could happen due to prolonged period of still, cloudy weather impeding wind and solar power, or hostility from "foreign threat actors". - BBC News has exclusive access to Jackdaw undergoing final checks and tests to be ready for production if government support granted. - The "business-as-usual" atmosphere is somewhat surreal given uncertainty; project has so far cost about £1.5bn according to Aberdeen-based Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Equinor. - McCulloch quote: "If I were the head of government for energy security and net zero, I'd be looking closely at where's my next source of energy security, and you're standing on it." - "The wells are drilled, they're hooked up. We're just readying the systems. It will be ready for the 1st of October." - "Jackdaw will play a crucial part of this winter's gas supply," he added, providing energy security, employment and tax to the UK. - Environmentalists say Jackdaw will only supply 2% of the country's yearly gas demand during the life of the field. - Quote from Tessa Khan, executive director of campaign group Uplift: "It would be a massive betrayal of the British public for the UK government to approve new oil and gas fields at a time when ordinary people are suffering so much as a result of these record-breaking heatwaves." - McCulloch in response: "So we all watch the same news, and we see that." - "But what we're saying is that Jackdaw should not take that on its shoulders, or it should take a very small share of that." - "It's a very, very small proportionality of the total global emissions." - Andy Burnham preparing for Downing Street, under pressure from within the Labour party to allow more oil exploration and to cut and stabilise tax on business and production. - Former PM Sir Tony Blair, business leaders, Westminster's energy committee among those echoing US President Donald Trump's call for the UK to "open up the North Sea." - Production in the basin peaked in 1999 at 4.5 million barrels of oil (or equivalent) per day (BOE). In 2024 it produced just over 1 million BOE. - Energy Transition Institute at Robert Gordon University predicts current policies will lead to about 1,600 offshore job losses per year for the coming decade. - Quote from Prof Paul de Leeuw: "Oil and gas is declining faster than many of us were expecting, but the renewables industry is simply not ready to take on all the jobs." - Rosebank contains an estimated 300 million to 500 million barrels of oil, making it the largest known untapped field in UK waters. - Adura says the gas from Jackdaw could supply 1.4m homes. - Decisions on oil and gas licensing are a matter for the UK government at Westminster but the Scottish government, run by the pro-independence Scottish National Party, also takes an interest, and it is divided on the issue. - Oil was once central to the economic case for Scotland leaving the UK but, as former first ministers, the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf both opposed Rosebank and Jackdaw. - Current First Minister John Swinney has tried to fudge the matter, saying new developments should only go ahead if they are compatible with the UK's commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. - Last year, the Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that both fields had been unlawfully approved because the consenting process had failed to take into account the impact on the climate of burning the oil and gas extracted from them. - Judge Lord Ericht said the operators would have to submit revised environmental impact assessments to the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). - On Tuesday, Adura said the updated assessment it had been required to produce suggested Jackdaw would account for less than 0.02% of yearly global greenhouse gases during its lifetime. - That assertion was dismissed as "self-serving" by Greenpeace, whose UK chief scientist Doug Parr said approving the field would be "reckless and indefensible" in the context of global commitments to slow down planetary warming. - If the NSTA gives its approval, the final decisions will fall to the current Energy Secretary, and Burnham's possible chancellor, Ed Miliband. - More than any other Labour politician, in opposition and in government, Miliband has crafted a policy which is positive about renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar and sceptical of new oil and gas developments. - While Miliband has said that oil and gas will be part of the UK's energy mix for decades to come, he has also been clear that he believes no new fields should be explored. - Quote from Miliband (21 April): "Drilling every last drop will not take a penny off bills," he argued in a speech on 21 April, adding that it "cannot give us energy security" either. - Critics accuse Miliband and departing PM Sir Keir Starmer of fumbling the transition to renewables, and causing hardship in north-east Scotland, which is home to an estimated 1 in 3 of the UK's 115,000 offshore oil and gas workers. - The Conservatives say this is why they stormed to victory 3 weeks ago in Westminster's Aberdeen South by-election when they gained the seat from the SNP and pushed Labour into 4th place. - In the wake of her party's emphatic win, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch told me the vote had been a "referendum on oil and gas". - Badenoch said she supported the transition to greener energy but added: "Renewables aren't ready." - "Simply switching off oil and gas is madness, particularly when we're still importing oil and gas from Russia, of all places." - In the light of global economic turmoil and disruption to oil and gas supplies driven by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, Labour has shifted position, pledging to reform the energy profits levy - also known as the windfall tax which amounts to a 78% levy on production - and to allow some new drilling if it is linked (or tied-back in industry jargon) to existing facilities. - There is much less talk these days of Labour's flagship 2024 election policy, the creation of a publicly owned green energy company called GB Energy based in Aberdeen. - In April, the head of the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation that advises on energy policy, appeared to validate Miliband's scepticism. - Fatih Birol said approving Jackdaw and Rosebank "would not make any significant difference" to the global energy situation unleashed by the US and Israel's war on Iran. - "It is up to the government, but these fields would not change much for the UK's energy security, nor would they change the price of oil and gas," he told the Guardian. - Back on Jackdaw, the work of construction continues regardless. - Four huge columns await the transportation of high-pressure gas from 5km beneath the platform, each but 100m of which is under the seabed. - This is a complex engineering task involving very high-pressure gas and very high temperatures. - A few steps away we saw the huge pipe which has been tied back to the existing Shearwater field, where the gas would be processed before being piped ashore to the St Fergus terminal in Aberdeenshire. - It all hangs in the balance. - The weather was calm as we visited Jackdaw but it is clear the field is in the middle of a heated debate about how to power the nation. Now we need to rewrite preserving quotes exactly. Let's list exact quotes we must keep: 1. "hyper critical" (in quotes) 2. "If I were the head of government for energy security and net zero, I'd be looking closely at where's my next source of energy security, and you're standing on it." 3. "The wells are drilled, they're hooked up. We're just readying the systems. It will be ready for the 1st of October." 4. "Jackdaw will play a crucial part of this winter's gas supply," he added, providing energy security, employment and tax to the UK. 5. "It would be a massive betrayal of the British public for the UK government to approve new oil and gas fields at a time when ordinary people are suffering so much as a result of these record-breaking heatwaves." 6. "So we all watch the same news, and we see that." 7. "But what we're saying is that Jackdaw should not take that on its shoulders, or it should take a very small share of that." 8. "It's a very, very small proportionality of the total global emissions." 9. "Drilling every last drop will not take a penny off bills," he argued in a speech on 21 April, adding that it "cannot give us energy security" either. 10. "Renewables aren't ready." 11. "Simply switching off oil and gas is madness, particularly when we're still importing oil and gas from Russia, of all places." 12. "It would not make any significant difference" to the global energy situation unleashed by the US and Israel's war on Iran. 13. "It is up to the government, but these fields would not change much for the UK's energy security, nor would they change the price of oil and gas," he told the Guardian. Also quotes from judge? Not quoted directly; we have paraphrased. The judge statement: "The operators would have to submit revised environmental impact assessments to the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA)." Not a direct quote; we can rephrase but must keep facts. Also quote from Doug Parr: "reckless and indefensible". That's a quote: "reck