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Surely fracking is just an oil and gas industry answer to the question 'how do we keep making money as the domestic supply of gas drops?'
They have then sold it in to governments as 'this is a great way to secure your domestic gas supply'
Whereas the question the government should be asking is 'how do we reduce demand and phase out gas altogether?'
If they shifted the billions of pounds in subsidies that goes into oil and gas into insulating homes and buildings and installing ground source heat pumps in every house it would be a good start.
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ONS report from 2015 shows we don't heavily rely on Russia for hydro carbons and not at all for gas
The likelihood of that changing much is unlikely, the Russia argument isn't really there, we do get a fair wedge of petrol from them though.
This, redacted, paper from 2014 by UK Gov gives estimates of potential supplies of gas, ranging from 1.1% of consumption to 89% of current consumption, so they didn't really know how much gas they really do have and even if their optimistic results are in place, they would need to drill 1100 wells a year (they also state this is highly unlikely).
This article here shows the effect of shale gas on the UK economy would be tiny.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918301764
In my opinion, the folk that will benefit the most are those that own, drill and frack these wells.
This is leaving out the potential ecological damage and the eyesore of thousands of wells having to be drilled to keep producing.
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Lebowski
Bernhard
@h2o
May have to. May not have to either. That’s part of the problem with the current state of the anti-fracking argument - it’s starting from the premise that everything will be the worst possible outcome imaginable.
Imports have to come from somewhere. The Norwegians can’t supply everything the UK needs, so we’re looking at Russian gas and LNG. Putting all our eggs in a Russian basket is risky geopolitically, and I don’t think the climate footprint of LNG is smaller than domestic fracking.