The Jackdaw gas field sits underneath the North Sea, 150 miles east of Aberdeen. For the past few years it – alongside the Rosebank oilfield – has been the subject of various consultations, legal spats and political wrangling over whether drilling there should be allowed. That confusion ended on Wednesday 21 October, when the Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh announced that the government had given its permission for extraction at Jackdaw to proceed.