![]() An increment of 10% from one country – which would be a stretch – is not enough to change regional pricing. ![]() We are governed by regional market pricing. Britain does not manufacture much of the relevant equipment – most of that would be European and North American.Įven if the UK were to generate significant gas, we are not likely to see lower gas prices – any more than living next to a farm would mean paying less for milk. ![]() Many of these crews would be from America. At Cuadrilla, we learned first-hand how much this kind of industrial activity is resented in Britain. This would mean dozens of rigs and fracking crews in continuous mobilisation across the country. The second issue is the enormous scale of operations that would be required to replace even 10% of UK natural gas: thousands of wells would need to be completed over the next 30 to 50 years, with the drilling and fracking of hundreds of wells a year. Existing investments in LNG infrastructure – commissioned before the war began – mean that Europe will have plentiful gas availability (much from “fracked” wells in other countries) with a return to pricing normality in two to three years. Today’s high gas and oil prices are not by themselves sufficient incentive for investors. But from an investment point of view, Britain’s cost envelope is itself a significant barrier to raising the many tens of billions of pounds required to embark on a meaningful UK shale gas programme. The upshot is that an operation that in the US, Canada and even Argentina is a rapid piece of keyhole surgery is in the UK a ponderous, slow-moving and costly operation.ĭemocratic process has created these regulations, and we are not criticising them. Governments have singled out the energy sector for regulations that impede operations that are standard in agriculture and other industries. On top of this, the UK is a very expensive place to operate. The construction and rail industries would not be able to exist under the standards that have been applied to onshore gas recovery. #NUMBER OF FRACKED WELLS IN THE US HOW TO#Learning how to recover this gas will take time – and indeed may create low-level, short-lived ground tremors, an issue that in Britain has been blown dramatically out of proportion. They are also heavily faulted and compartmentalised, unlike the generally continuous gas-bearing formations underlying large parts of Pennsylvania, Texas and Alberta. In Lancashire, we learned in 2011 that the shale formations are extremely gassy. In our view, there are two key additional barriers: technical and economic feasibility, and sociopolitical alignment around scale.įirst, just because a resource exists does not mean it’s feasible or economic to extract it. We would not be able to import liquid natural gas (LNG) from the US and Canada if it were not produced by fracking in those countries.ĭisagreements about safety are not the real challenge, however. ![]() ![]() Fracking has been regarded as safe practice by knowledgable regulators in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina and others – countries where many thousands of wells are fracked on an annual basis. The techniques have been made needlessly controversial in the UK due to misrepresented concerns about isolated incidents of groundwater contamination and microseismicity, the former of which only take place when mistakes are made during well management. This takes place 2-4km below the surface, about the distance between Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, under a number of impermeable layers of rock. Fracking – more technically known as hydraulic fracturing – is necessary to liberate methane molecules from hard shales and many other rock types. ![]()
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