by Savannah Sottak, KCL
In February 2023, the Environmental Law Foundation referred a case involving methane pollution to the King’s College Human Rights and Environmental (HRE) Legal Clinic. The HRE Clinic prioritises cases at the intersection of human rights and the environment, mostly climate change related. The clients, a group of local residents now called Singleton Forest Watch Group, are concerned about methane emissions to air from an onshore oil and gas drilling site owned by STAR Energy in the village of Singleton in the South Downs. The clients had made several complaints to government agencies about the unlimited amount of methane permitted to be released from the site but had been ignored. Originally seeking a legal remedy for the lack of oversight at this oilfield, the case has since grown into the wider issue of failures by governmental agencies to properly monitor onshore oil and gas fields to ensure the UK will achieve its international climate goal agreements.
I joined the HRE Clinic in September 2023, by which point the clinic had already done a lot of work on the project. The first year entailed in-depth research and a comprehensive understanding of the dangers of methane emissions on the environment as well as the national and international laws in place to prevent it. This was done by a group of students who have now graduated but without their initial work, the case would not have been able to progress.
The second KLC team picked up where they left off and submitted several Freedom of Information/Environmental Information Regulations (FOI/EIR) requests to the Environment Agency (EA) to gather information on the Singleton Oil field. These requests were to assess the reports of methane emissions to air and water provided by the operator, STAR Energy, collected by the EA as part of their monitoring and regulating duties. These reports were highly technical and so the KLC team consulted experts in methane emissions from another university and an NGO to understand the science. The EA replies showed continuous flaring and venting from the Singleton site which could be interpreted as ‘routine’. Routine flaring is separate from safety flaring and has been defined by the World Bank as flaring that occurs during the normal production of oil. This has recently been banned in the EU by 2025 and in the UK by 2030.
The team, led by Sue Willman HRE Clinic supervising solicitor, has visited the Singleton Oilfield twice. At their first visit in 2023, the students met the clients for the first time and got to see the functioning of the oilfield. At the second visit in April 2024, the students were joined by a global NGO Clean Air Task Force (CATF), an environmental scientist Ruth Hayhurst, a journalist for Drill or Drop, a local Green Party representative and members of the Singleton Forest Watch group. This trip found more methane leaks than on the CATF’s previous visits and emissions of hydrocarbons including methane and non-methane Volatile organic compound (VOCs) were detected. The leaks were found at the separator tanks and flares (as previously in 2020 and 2021) but additionally leaks were coming from the vent stack and the ground. This worried the CATF who considered the site not to be of the standard expected in the UK. It was quite an experience seeing an oilfield in real life and viewing the emissions through the specialist camera; the smell of the gasses being released was potent and actually did make many of the KCL team feel light headed. Seeing it in real life gave the case more meaning and reinforced everyone in the HRE team’s dedication to finding a way of ensuring oilfields like Singleton are being properly monitored by regulating bodies.
Starting as a seemingly small problem of an oil drilling site releasing the most damaging greenhouse gas, methane, through flaring, venting and fugitive emissions, the more the HRE team got involved, the bigger the issue became. It was realised that this is a problem occurring at several onshore oil and gas sites in the UK and would require grassroots political campaigning to highlight the issue.
The UK has signed the international Glasgow Methane Pledge, to reduce global methane emissions by 2030 and ban flaring and venting by 2025. With Singleton Forest Watch we drafted evidence to a House of Lords Methane Inquiry to encourage them to implement certain changes required to meet the Pledge goals. The HRE students are now working with a barristers chambers to consider further action, possibly widening the case to other onshore oilfields in the South Downs area to demonstrate to the government the seriousness of improper monitoring and regulating of greenhouse gas emissions by oil and gas sites in the UK. The recent Supreme Court decision in the Horse Hill case gives encouragement that there may be a solution.
https://elflaw.org/news/methane-emissions-from-singleton-oilfield-in-south-downs/
