The company behind plans to extract gas from the Manx seabed has been granted another licence extension.

Crogga was originally granted a three-year licence in 2018 as part of a plan to drill for hydrocarbons off the east coast of the island.

But those plans have stalled and the existing licence, already extended in 2021, ran out on July 31 this year.

Crogga is seeking to vary its conditions to start exploratory drilling based on 2D survey of the seabed carried out by BP in the 1990s.

But the condition of the original licence was that drilling only take place when a new 3D seismic survey was carried out.

Now Crogga has been granted a three-month extension to provide additional information so that its application to vary the licence can be ‘fully considered’, said the Department of Infrastructure.

Crogga previously blamed ‘inaction on the part of the DoI’ for the delay in drilling an appraisal well and as a result the commercial extraction of gas from the Manx seabed had been pushed back to 2027 at the earliest.

Critics of the project believe allowing fossil fuel extraction is at odds with the government’s ambition to reach net zero climate emissions by 2050. In January last year, the firm announced it had appointed Three60 Energy to drill an appraisal well to find out how much gas is under the seabed 10.5 miles off Maughold Head.

A subscription process was launched to fund the drilling, allowing members of the public to invest in the project. However, in a newsletter to shareholders in June that year, it announced it had taken the decision to return subscriptions, saying that the project had stalled.

In the House of Keys the following month Douglas North MHK David Ashford warned that the island was ‘at risk of missing a huge potential opportunity’ and decision needed to be made one way or the other. In a statement, the DoI said it continues to assess the application made by Crogga Limited to vary the terms of its Seaward Production Innovative Licence by bringing forward the drilling of an appraisal well.

‘The company has been granted a short period of additional time to provide information relating to the variation request. The three-month extension is aimed at allowing time for a variation of the licence to be fully considered,’ it said.

‘The licence currently requires the company to undertake a work programme as part of phase B, which includes a 3D seismic survey, prior to moving to exploratory drilling in phase C. The variation request would allow drilling on the basis of a 2D survey.’

Crogga claims gas located beneath the Manx seabed had the potential to power the island for hundreds of years.