With the ban on fracking lifted, podcaster ANTHONY DAY explains why it is not the answer to our energy crisis

We have an energy crisis and we urgently need solutions.

Why not drill into the vast reserves of gas in the rocks beneath our feet and release it using fracking?

Fracking is a process where high-pressure water is injected into gas-bearing shale deep underground.

This separates the layers of rock to release the gas, and sand and a thickener mixed with the water keep the cracks open so the gas continues to flow.

Cuadrilla, which opened an exploratory site in Lancashire amidst continuous protests, has estimated that a production well could deliver 6.5 billion cubic feet (184 million cubic metres) of gas over a 30-year lifetime.

And according to UK Onshore Oil and Gas, (UKOOG) the representative body for the UK onshore oil and gas industry, a fracking well could be up and running in just 3-5 months, giving us British energy unaffected by foreign countries or foreign currencies.

Unfortunately it’s not quite so simple.

Although there are deposits of shale beneath most of the north of England the British Geological Survey points out that there is little data to reveal exactly how much gas they may contain and estimates vary widely.

York Press: flashback to a fracking protest in Ryedaleflashback to a fracking protest in Ryedale (Image: Supplied)

They are based on experience in North America but there is no guarantee that conditions will be the same or that gas will be as easy to extract.

The estimates of as little as three to five months to commission a new well must be seen through very rose-tinted glasses.

That might be possible once permissions are granted, but the approval process typically takes months, if not years, so fracking cannot provide a swift answer to our energy crisis.

One of the things that planning authorities and local residents need to be certain of is that the process will not cause earth tremors, which have occurred on exploratory sites.

There is also the question of traffic to and from the site to collect the gas, unless the well is connected directly to the national gas grid, which is unlikely to be feasible for most sites.

There’s concern about the considerable quantities of water that are needed for fracking, and where it will end up after it’s been injected into the ground.

And some say there’s a risk that the water table could be contaminated with gas or fracking fluid.

Assuming all these objections are overcome, how much gas are we going to get once a site starts operating?

As we saw, Cuadrilla expects some 6.5 billion cubic feet of gas over a well’s 30-year lifetime.

On average that’s just over 6 million cubic metres of gas per year, or enough to supply 4,600 average households out of the UK’s 28 million.

To put it another way, in order to meet the nation’s annual requirement of 77 billion cubic metres of gas we would have to drill more than 12,500 fracking wells.

That might be possible in the gas-lands of America, but over here we just don’t have the room!

The fundamental objection to fracking is that it is producing fossil fuels, which in turn produce carbon emissions which are driving the climate crisis.

Apart from the carbon dioxide created when natural gas is burnt, fugitive emissions add to the problem. This is gas which escapes into the atmosphere from the well.

Natural gas is mostly methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

American experience reveals that up to 10 per cent of extracted gas is lost in this way.

While we may be able to produce some gas from fracking it won’t be any cheaper.

It will be sold at world market prices.

The government has suggested that people living close to fracking sites could be rewarded with discounts, but it will be interesting to see whether that actually motivates consumers.

There’s shale not only in the North, but under some of the Home Counties.

Will the government encourage exploitation down there, or will they leave it to the “desolate North-East” as as one politician described it?

Yes, we have an energy crisis and yes, we need urgent solutions.

Fracking is not that solution.

We can solve the problem more quickly and cheaply with existing technologies for renewables and storage as long as we manage demand, but that’s for another article.

 

Anthony Day

Anthony Day, who lives in York and is an occasional correspondent to the letters page of The Press, has been interested in the environment since The Ecologist published Blueprint for Survival back in 1972.

He’s been podcasting on sustainability since 2007 and with over 400 episodes the Sustainable Futures Report is available every week to listeners across the world. Anthony is a member of the Professional Speaking Association and of IEMA, the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment.

He also keeps bees.

 

Sources

The sources quoted in writing this article were: