Industry figures have warned that refusing the Jackdaw and Rosebank developments would mark what they call "the end of oil and gas production in the UK," Aberdeen Live reports.

The warning centres on two of the remaining flagship projects on the UK continental shelf. Jackdaw, operated by Shell in the Central North Sea, and Rosebank, operated by Equinor west of Shetland, are the largest undeveloped discoveries still moving through the consent process in British waters.

Both projects have faced sustained legal and regulatory pressure. Environmental campaigners have challenged the consents in court, arguing that the approvals failed to properly account for downstream emissions. That litigation has kept the fields' futures in question and placed the final consenting decisions at the centre of the debate over the basin's decline curve.

What does the warning actually claim?

The core claim, as reported by Aberdeen Live, is blunt: if regulators refuse or withdraw consent for Jackdaw and Rosebank, UK oil and gas production ends.

That framing reflects the state of the mature basin. With few large projects left in the pipeline beyond these two fields, operators argue there is no volume on the horizon to replace declining output from ageing assets. A refusal would remove the last major increments of new supply.

Treat the claim as advocacy from an industry fighting for investment, not as an engineering forecast. Existing fields would not stop producing the day after a refusal; the argument is that without new developments, the basin's production decline steepens until output effectively ceases.

Why these two fields carry the weight

Jackdaw and Rosebank matter to the UK sector for a simple reason: scale. Each represents the kind of multi-hundred-million-barrel development that has become rare in a basin where most new tiebacks are small subsea additions to existing infrastructure.

For the supply chain, centred on Aberdeen, the projects also represent years of engineering, fabrication and offshore work at a time when contractors have seen workload thin as operators redirect capital to lower-carbon spending and international portfolios.

Who decides, and when?

The consenting authorities must weigh the court findings against the government's stated position on domestic hydrocarbons. Regulators and ministers have repeatedly framed continued North Sea production as compatible with the transition, while campaign groups push for consent refusal on climate grounds.

The operators, Shell and Equinor, have held to their positions on the fields while reviewing options in light of the legal outcomes. Both companies have separately flagged the UK fiscal and regulatory environment as a factor in their broader investment decisions.

The watch item

The decisive moment is the next consent decision on Jackdaw and Rosebank. A refusal would confirm the industry's worst-case reading of the basin's future; an approval upheld would buy the sector time, but not settle the underlying argument over the UK's remaining reserves.

Watch also for any operator statement on revised project economics or divestment of the assets, either of which would signal how the companies themselves rate the odds.