UK Oil and Gas (UKOG), the company behind the long-running and ultimately unsuccessful bid to drill for oil at Horse Hill in Surrey, has sold the site for just £1m and rebranded as UK Energy Group, pivoting towards clean energy projects such as salt-cavern storage. The sale comes after the 2024 supreme court "Finch Ruling", which found that planning authorities must consider the indirect downstream greenhouse gas emissions of oil and gas projects, a decision that overturned council approval for the site's expansion and effectively destroyed its financial value. The case illustrates how climate litigation can trigger "regulatory stranding", wiping out the value of fossil fuel assets almost overnight, particularly for smaller firms reliant on a single project.

The Horse Hill licence area was once valued at up to £46m, with UKOG reportedly investing more than £25m on the basis of industry estimates of up to 9.24bn barrels of oil, but its accounts had written the asset down to just £55,360 before the sale. The new owner, Energy B, has taken over a renewed planning application submitted to Surrey county council in May seeking to extract nearly 700,000 tonnes of oil over 20 years via four production wells and associated infrastructure. Campaigner Sarah Finch, who won the original supreme court case, has criticised the new application's environmental assessment for failing to account for cumulative emissions from other fossil fuel projects, despite the development being projected to produce around 2.3m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime.