05.03.10 BP: Gas is the answer, not wind

The chief executive of BP, Tony Hayward, hit the headlines recently after stating that Britain should put less emphasis on developing its wind power options and work instead on utilising its gas supplies by improving its storage and infrastructure.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4, he said that in Britain gas comes with "a very unreasonable paranoia”. Instead, he called it an “opportunity”, highlighting its low-carbon qualities and suggesting it could be the best way to “bridge between where we are today and where we want to be in 20 or 30 years' time”.

He also made similar comments in an interview in The Guardian newspaper, highlighting that gas is the best strategy at the moment for the UK’s energy needs and that we should make much more use of it.

In comments that are sure to prove controversial, he also called for the scaling down of green energy programmes as these were not going to help the UK in the short term. He highlighted wind in particular, criticising it as being too ambitious. He said that wind schemes may struggle to reach even half of their set power goals, and that as a result we should move into wind power generation much more slowly rather than jumping straight in.

Gas, on the other hand, gets a bad press, but is the best way to beat global warming in the short term. He said that if Britain used its own North Sea reserves with imports from many different sources then this would be the best way to deal with our energy problems. He also highlighted the fear surrounding Russian gas, saying that the possibility of Russia using gas as a political weapon was "massively exaggerated".

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