Greenpeace has been active against offshore drilling many places around the world, but hasn’t had much luck in stopping drilling activity.
They have lost court cases and been fined several times and in several places.
Latest in the UK after action against a Transocean rig drilling for BP:
They will probably do a crowd fund which will pay that fine in days.
It’s a matter of time before offshore exploration is banned in the UK, but like anywhere else it’s a hugely political decision.
Almost all of the prime areas offshore UK for oil and gas exploration are in Scottish territorial waters, the economic arguments for Scottish independence wasn’t great back in 2014 when oil was over $100 per barrel, so they haven’t got any better with the oil price decline, the UK sector of the North sea is one of the most expensive places to extract oil in the world, with a very high break even price around $40 per barrel, so many companies won’t be making much profit at current prices. A lot of Scottish nationalists are very concerned about the environment, so they probably want to ban exploration, but they can’t do that yet as it could potentially lose them a lot of votes in the communities where a lot of people work offshore.
If Scotland had gone independent in the 1960s when the offshore was just starting they probably be as rich as Norway, but all the money had to be shared with around 65 million other people instead of just 5 million. The UK also made a big mistake by not having a state owned oil company like Statoil, a lot of the profits were given to multinational oil companies instead, unfair as now tax payers are having to shoulder a lot of the costs for decommissioning.