So far, the Scottish government has remained aloof from the fracking frenzy generated south of the border by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. They’ve been speaking of an opportunity not to be missed in harnessing Britain’s shale gas reserves, believed to be huge and lying beneath much of southern and northern England and in central Scotland.
The Chancellor has even cut the tax rate on shale gas extraction from 62 per cent to 30 per cent and talked of reducing the average time for obtaining planning permission from 13 weeks to 2 weeks. Another dash for gas is apparently under way.
Fracking – a controversial technique
But will the hydraulic fracturing revolution ever come to Britain? And will the Scottish government get swept up in it? The answer I think is “No” to both questions but not before a lot of political mud has been thrown.
We’re already seen public protests at Little Stumble in West Sussex where the American/Australian company Cuadrilla has been trying to drill a well down to the shale reserves 800 metres below. It was this same company which is alleged to have caused two minor earthquakes in Lancashire with its fracking operations in April 2011.
But this hasn’t put the UK government off. They point to the United States where unconventional gas, as it’s called, has cut gas prices in half and led to a second oil-rush. In states from Texas to Michigan, including the old coal states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of wells have been sunk and millions of tons of mud and chemicals have been pumped into the bore holes to fracture the shale layers and release the precious gas. Out there in the wild west, planning and environmental law are not specialities.
British Geological Survey HQ in Edinburgh
In Britain the Institute of Directors have been equally gung ho. They estimate that shale gas could supply a tenth of the UK’s energy needs for the next century. The British Geological Survey is almost as optimistic. It says shale gas beneath the North of England could supply Britain’s gas needs for 40 years. Price Waterhouse Cooper says there could be £30-£60 billion worth of gas in Britain’s shale reserves, at least £5 billion of that in Scotland.
The trouble is that it will cost a lot of money to squeeze it all out, not to mention the disruption, noise and scarring of up to 100,000 drilling sites across the fairly densely populated counties of England and Scotland.
So far, there have been no fracking operations in Scotland. But we have come close to it. The Australian company Dart Energy acquired fracking permits from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency for a site it took over on the Duke of Buccleuch’s land at Canonbie in Dumfriesshire but it is now handing them back. It’s perhaps a wise PR move, since the company is currently trying to win government approval for a much bigger drilling operation at Airth, near Falkirk.
It’s important at this point to draw a distinction between fracking and coal bed methane extraction which is what Dart Energy is doing at Airth. Fracking involves drilling a well down 800 to 1,000 metres, then drilling horizontally into the shale layer, then pumping mud and sand and up to a hundred different chemicals into the shale at enormous pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas which is then collected in the well and pumped to the surface.
Coal bed methane gas is much easier to extract. This simply involves drilling a vertical well and some horizontal offshoots into the coal bed. Water and methane gas are released under their own pressure and come spurting to the surface. The gas is separated out and the water is discharged into a river or the sea.
There are lots of questions to be asked – and are being asked, by local residents and the environmental organisations – about the purity of the water and the containment of the gas and the disruption of the drilling operation. But coal bed extraction can also lead to fracking, as experience in Australia has shown. Once the wells are drilled and the coal seam has yielded up its gas, it is tempting to go a little deeper and frack into the shale to release its gas too.
Dart Energy Well at Airth
© Copyright M J Richardson. Licensed for reuse under Creative Commons
Dart Energy say they have no plans to begin fracking. They are simply asking for planning permission for 10 new wells at Airth. They have already drilled 14 test wells over the last 9 years but they are now ready to invest £120m in production wells and a processing plant, creating more than 50 new jobs.
So far, the Scottish government has remained silent on fracking. But it will be interesting to see what it decides over Dart Energy’s plans at Airth. It could simply see them as another source of energy in a land already blessed with oil, conventional gas, coal, hydro, wind, tide and wave power. What, afterall, is so different about coal bed extraction compared with traditional mining where water was pumped out of the mines and deposited in the sea. Or, for that matter, what is so different about fracking compared to blasting coal from mines deep in the earth’s crust?
But actually, things have moved on from the days of King Coal. We have carbon reduction targets to meet – how does fracking or coal bed extraction fit in with those? Besides, we are supposed to be looking for re-newable sources of energy, like wind or tide or solar power, where we are not eating away at the natural resources of the planet.
Despite our fine words about energy conservation – and our new technology which encourages it – it seems that mankind is destined to demand more and more power. So far we have cut down our forests, dug into the earth, drilled into the seabed and attempted to tame the atom. But my guess is that fracking, at least in Britain, will not be worth the trouble.