From the North Sea to Latin America: Why Energy Security Is Reshaping the Upstream Investment Case
The United Kingdom’s Labour government is weighing approval for new North Sea oil and gas production. What that decision reveals about the global energy landscape, and about Latin American markets.
Andy Burnham came to power with a Labour manifesto that promised no new North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses. He is now widely expected to approve two of the most significant offshore projects in the United Kingdom’s pipeline: Rosebank, an oil and gas field estimated to hold between 300 and 500 million barrels and the largest undeveloped resource in UK waters, and Jackdaw, a gas field that Shell says could supply up to 6.5% of UK gas output at peak production.
The political reversal is significant. But the energy argument it reveals is more important.
Security Wins the Debate Every Time
The case for Rosebank and Jackdaw is not ideological. It is arithmetic. Domestic production reduces import dependency. It protects jobs and industrial expertise that, once lost, take decades to rebuild. And in a world where energy prices are set by global markets, having supply close to home is a buffer that no policy paper can replicate.
Critics are right that these fields alone will not lower household bills overnight. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit estimates that over 90% of likely recoverable North Sea resources have already been extracted. These are not transformational volumes. But that is precisely the point: even marginal domestic production is worth defending when the alternative is importing the same hydrocarbons from further away, at higher cost, with more emissions in the supply chain.
Burnham’s reported position, that the UK “can’t ignore” its North Sea resources and will take “a pragmatic approach”, is not a betrayal of climate commitments. It is an acknowledgment that energy transitions take time, and that the countries which manage that transition most effectively are those that use what they have while building what comes next.
The Same Logic Applies Everywhere
Colombia produces crude oil. It imports a significant share of the diesel it consumes. That gap, between what is in the ground and what is available at the fuel terminal, costs the country billions annually in import bills and subsidy exposure. It is the same structural problem the United Kingdom is navigating, at a different scale, in a different geography.
The operators who understand this moment are not the ones waiting for a perfect policy environment. They are the ones who recognize that producing hydrocarbons close to where they are consumed, processing them efficiently, and doing so with lower-emission technology is not a contradiction of the energy transition. It is a contribution to it.
Think Energy Holdings operates at exactly that intersection. The group’s patented modular technology converts crude oil and condensates into ultra-low-sulfur diesel at the field level, reducing lifecycle CO2 emissions by up to 50% versus conventional refining, validated by Texas A&M University and ISO 14067 certified. Think Energy is currently evaluating upstream field opportunities in Colombia and broader Latin America, in a regulatory environment that, like the UK’s, is moving toward pragmatism.
When a Labour prime minister approves North Sea drilling, it is not a concession. It is a recognition of something the energy industry has always known: the world needs hydrocarbons today, and the question is not whether to produce them, but who produces them, how, and with what technology.
Think Energy’s answer to that question is already built.
