Duel: Is it time to frack in Britain?

Climate crisis or the fuel of the future? Our panellists battle it out

by Benny Peiser / June 19, 2014 / Leave a comment

Published in July 2014 issue of Prospect Magazine

Britain is on the cusp of a shale gas and oil revolution which could help to rejuvenate the economy and bring cheaper energy to millions of people.

Britain holds one of the biggest shale basins in the world. The British Geological Survey estimates that there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas trapped below the north of England alone. In addition, there are huge reserves of shale oil that lie below many areas of the United Kingdom: recent estimates suggest there could 4.4bn barrels of shale oil in the Weald Basin of southern England and a new report suggests there are even bigger shale oil resources below Leicestershire.

In fact, there are many shale areas in Britain that have not been explored yet. And then there are the country’s gigantic offshore shale reserves which, according to the British Geological Survey, could be five to 10 times bigger than onshore reserves.

In its shale gas report in May 2011, the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has applied a conservative recovery rate of 10 per cent to estimate the technically recoverable shale gas reserves. In America, however, advances in fracking technology have pushed the average recovery rate to almost 20 per cent. In some cases, up to 30 per cent of unconventional gas has been extracted.

Britain currently consumes around 2.7 trillion cubic feet of gas per year. If 15-20 per cent of the estimated reserves could be economically recovered it would provide Britons with up to 100 years’ worth of natural gas supplies at current consumption rates—offsetting the depletion of the ageing North Sea fields. It could reinvigorate industrial activity in the north of the country and create a new industry.

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Comments

Chilli
June 21, 2014 at 19:07
> The height of a drilling rig is about that of a medium-sized wind turbine, > A single drilling pad could be working around the clock for years.I'm suprised Benny let him get away with this rubbish: The drilling rig is only present on site for 3-4 weeks. Once drilled all that remains is a small single-storey shed on a tennis-court sized pitch like this http://vps.templar.co.uk/Energy%20pictures/Wellhead.jpg except in the UK additional screening hedges would be required so you wouldn't even see it.It should also be noted that one small well like this can reliably generate as much energy as 300 intermittent 2MW wind-turbines which would have a much worse impact on the environment.
mwhite
June 22, 2014 at 09:18
Fracking has been going on in Britain for yearshttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396378/50-year-old-fracking-site-makes-mockery-Balcombe-zealots-Its-nature-reserve--fracked-gas-oil-power-21-000-homes-day--complaints-locals.html
John Rhys
June 27, 2014 at 17:06
This is an argument that is largely based on a false premise. The energy industry consensus, by and large, is that, quite unlike the US, fracking will not be a game changer here, and will not deliver either substantial volumes or lower prices. Its prospects have been seriously over-hyped, particularly by government ministers.But a more interesting question for the remedial economics class would be an explanation of exactly why a natural resource endowment is automatically assumed to boost industrial competitiveness. When British industrial competitiveness was being wrecked in the 1980s, Thatcher ministers happily latched on to the the (John Kay/ Peter Forsyth) thesis that the loss of industry was a natural, inevitable, and desirable consequence of our resource endowment of North Sea oil, ie the exact opposite effect of what Benny Peiser is now arguing.Even your current issue provides a good counter-example in contrasting the "competitiveness" of Israel and oil rich Saudi Arabia, but there are plenty of other contradictions to the equation of low energy prices and competitiveness. Germany is widely seen as the most competitive European economy but has had among the highest energy prices, as have most of the Asian tigers. Subsidising domestic industry by limiting energy exports or subsidised domestic prices has been a widespread recipe for economic failure, in the Middle East and elsewhere.
John Tilston
July 1, 2014 at 00:10
Maybe we are all getting ahead of ourselves. We don't know enough about UK's shale yet. More exploration is needed, constrained by appropriate regulations. Let's just take this one step at a time.
Paul Cairns
July 3, 2014 at 00:29
It is a pity the pair Prospect invited to debate fracking have taken such simplistic, parochial positions. The real issue here, as with all remaining fossil fuel reserves, is that it should not be extracted and burnt - however great the "bounty" lying under the ground. There is virtually complete scientific consensus (not just "broad agreement") that global warming is underway and will, in time, cause unparalleled mayhem for the human race. Whether or not fracking can be achieved without some minor (in comparison) environmental inconvenience or ugliness misses the point. We have to stop, almost completely, putting more carbon-dioxide into the air.The popular clamour for cheap energy is the last thing that politicians should heed. The price-to-consumer mechanism is the most potent instrument for reducing fuel burning. What people actually need is affordable comfort in their homes and industry's needs are parallel ("we have to be able to do what we need to do but usingless energy and getting that without burning fossil fuel"). We can, easily and cheaply, build houses that do not require heating - but can't be bothered. Bring in a new era of cheap (fracked) gas and what will happen? Consumption is hardly likely to fall.We live in a society with a prodigious appetite for energy and much of it is quite unavoidably required (e.g. for food production, distribution and storage). So, we have an unavoidable, solemn duty to husband our power use extremely meticulously. Renewable sources remain unlikely to ever fill the gap - not least because of their intermittent availablity and the enduring lack of cheap scalable energy storage. The future will be nuclear - no two ways about that. Our efforts must be ploughed into rigorous energy efficiency coupled with developing safer ways of "harnessing the atom" - of which there are many waiting in the wings but shackled by cheap "here and now" fossil fuels. We have no alternative, whatsoever - but we do have a possible path away from massive climate disruption if we have the imagination and the will and vigour to embrace it