French group TotalEnergies has announced it will cut its planned investments in the British North Sea by a quarter next year, after London raised a one-off tax on the record profits of energy giants.
TotalEnergies is “assessing the impact on its current and planned projects” of a “further change in the tax environment” in the UK, Jean-Luc Guiziou, head of the group’s UK exploration and production subsidiary, said in a statement sent to the AFP. on Friday.
The British government announced at the end of November that a tax on energy profits, introduced in May, would increase from 25% to 35% and be extended for three years, until 2028. London intends to involve companies that have seen their las profits soar on energy boom since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The possibility of reducing this tax in exchange for investment, much criticized by environmentalists, remains, but now it is much more of an incentive for low-carbon projects, less so for oil and gas projects.
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Such a tax was vociferously demanded by NGOs and the Labor opposition, but the conservative majority resisted for a long time, fearing it would discourage investment in the sector in the midst of the energy crisis, before giving in, faced with the need to fill the state. chests
Among the investments abandoned by TotalEnergies, a project stands out in the Elgin field, off Aberdeen, in Scotland, for an “infill well”, a well that is added to existing wells to improve the recovery of hydrocarbons. Other energy companies have announced that the increase in this tax will force them to review their investments in the country, such as Shell.
However, the head of the British giant, Ben van Beurden, had estimated in October that a greater contribution from the sector to the protection of homes hardest hit by the increase in energy was “a social reality” that had to be “accepted”. The European Commission, for its part, launched at the end of September a “temporary solidarity contribution” on the benefits of energy groups.
TotalEnergies, which announced a new record profit in the third quarter of 6.6 billion dollars, estimates that it would have to pay 1 billion euros in six European Union countries in 2022 if this contribution were applied everywhere. In France, the Senate, dominated by the right-wing opposition, rejected the introduction of such a tax at the end of November.
Source: BFM TV
