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David Cameron’s long and risky campaign to unleash a shale gas revolution in Britain finally met with success on Monday, when government ministers opened up more than half the country to drilling.
The prime minister and his top deputies had been promoting shale gas for years, declaring that his government is “going all out for shale” as a way to reverse the country’s dependency on imported fuels, create jobs and bring down, or a least slow the relentless increase, of energy prices.
Lately, the crisis in Ukraine added a geo-political boost to their effort. Russia is the top supplier of gas to Europe and much of that gas travels through Ukrainian pipelines.
But the drilling approval has come with severe restrictions that deprived Mr. Cameron of total victory. Drilling in national parks and “areas of outstanding natural beauty” will only be allowed in “exceptional circumstances,” government guidelines dictated. Those circumstances were not immediately clear.
A spokeswoman for the department of communities and local government, publisher of the new drilling guidelines, said “defining exceptional circumstances is not an easy thing to do. It all depends on local communities and local conditions.”
National parks cover 9.3 per cent of the land area of England, 20 per cent of Wales and 7.2 per cent of Scotland. Areas of outstanding natural beauty cover about 15 per cent of England.
While those areas are not technically off limits, any attempt to drill in them would be fiercely opposed by nature, heritage and environmental groups, some of whom decried the government’s Monday decision to open Britain to shale drilling.
A few European countries, including France and Germany, have banned shale gas “fracking” – the injection of high-pressure water, chemicals and sand into shale reserves to crack them open – for fear the process would pollute groundwater and trigger earthquakes.
While the shale industry lobby group, the UK Onshore Operators Group, predicts “sizable production” from shale gas, it is doubtful that a U.S.-style gas bonanza is either imminent or probable in the next couple of decades. The oil and gas industry itself is wary.
Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla Resources, one of Britain’s few fracking pioneers, in effect said that that a shale gas evolution is more likely than a revolution.
At a Chatham House event in London in April, he said that even if Britain were in the throes of an energy emergency and all restraints on shale gas exploration and development were scrapped, “it would take two, three or four years to get up to appreciable production rates.”
Britain does not have a single commercial shale gas well but there is little doubt it is sitting on potentially vast quantities of gas. Recently, the British Geological Survey put the shale resource at 1,300-trillion cubic feet.
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