Theresa May could create jobs, slash bills and boost our post-Brexit economy if she gets fracking
The US shale oil and gas industry is worth more than £150BILLION and is getting bigger
IMAGINE if our new Prime Minister Theresa May could wave her wand and achieve the following miracles within five years.
Create 500,000 new jobs, slash our electricity bills, restore British manufacturing, boost our economy, make us richer and stop our energy supplies being held to ransom by Putin, the Arabs, the French and other foreign regimes.
Well, the good news is she can, right now, and doesn’t need magic to do it.
All she needs to do is get fracking — the marvellous technology that extracts shale gas and oil from the ground.
Fracking has worked wonders for the US economy and could do the same for ours.
Shale gas is just as valuable and useful as the natural gas we’ve been harvesting from the North Sea for decades.
The only difference is that, because it’s mixed up with rock sediment, it used to be impossible to recover.
Then along came fracking. Suddenly the world had a new energy source just waiting to be harvested by those countries lucky enough to have shale gas and oil deposits.
Britain is one of them. We’ve got loads of the stuff.
Beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire alone, in the Bowland Shale, there are reserves so vast — around 1,300 trillion cubic feet — that even if we could extract just a tenth of them it would be enough to supply our gas needs for 50 years.
There may be similar energy gold mines everywhere, from the Sussex Weald to the north of Scotland.
Under the North Sea, the British Geological Survey estimates there may be ten times as much still.
‘Miracle’
This would make the UK one of the world’s top gas producers, with enough cheap, clean, homegrown energy to last us for well over a century.
But our progress in tapping this has been painfully slow, with the green lobby and councils strangling the process.
For example, Cuadrilla was granted a licence to explore for shale in Lancashire in 2007.
A decade on, not one single cubit foot of shale gas has yet been extracted in Lancashire or anywhere else in Britain.
And it’s still waiting, as Lancashire County Council has rejected Cuadrilla’s planning applications to develop two sites to explore for shale gas, due to noise and transport complaints.
So, though the Government last December sold licences for 159 new gas and oil exploration blocks — including 21 to the Anglo-Swiss chemicals giant Ineos — it could be years before any come on stream.
In Texas it takes seven days to get permission to frack a site. In Britain, it can take ten years or more to clear the regulatory hurdles.
Across the Pond, they have been fracking for more than a decade.
It is so advanced it is known as the shale gas “miracle”. The shale oil and gas industry in the US is now worth in excess of 200billion dollars and is expected to get much bigger.
In 2015 a BP Energy Outlook report predicted that within 20 years the US could become self-sufficient in oil and will hold 75 per cent of the world’s shale gas market.
As a result, America now has the world’s lowest electricity prices and cheapest gas (half what it costs in Europe).
It now exports more petroleum products than it imports (so is no longer reliant on the Middle East) and its heavy manufacturing industries are enjoying a huge renaissance.
Lower energy costs mean higher productivity, so that suddenly US manufacturers can compete on equal terms with countries like China.
Contracts previously outsourced abroad are now increasingly being done at home (“reshoring”), which has meant a rise in jobs (more than 800,000 since 2011) for US blue-collar workers.
Could the same happen here? Most definitely, but for one problem.
For many people fracking is a dirty word. Not only does it sound rude, it has been the victim of a prolonged smear campaign by various green lobby groups such as Greenpeace which see it as a threat to their beloved renewable energy.
And they’re right. It is a threat. Unlike solar or wind turbines (a.k.a. bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco- crucifixes), shale gas is cheap, reliable and does not need any taxpayer subsidies.
Nor does it kill wildlife or ruin the landscape for years on end.
The gas goes into a contraption, much smaller than a turbine, called a “Christmas tree”, which only stays up for a few months then disappears forever once the gas has been harvested. It’s also clean and safe.
The horror stories you hear put out by green activists — gas leaks, contaminated water, dodgy chemicals, “earthquakes” — have been investigated and exposed as lies, propaganda and nonsense.
Many of the worst claims against fracking appeared in a heavily politicised 2010 documentary called GasLand.
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Means business
They included scenes where flaming gas was shown flaring from a kitchen tap at a frack site in Pennsylvania and local families testified to having had their water wells contaminated and property values slashed by fracking.
A subsequent court case, however, showed that the poisoning claims had been fabricated, that local property values increased and that the gas-in-taps phenomenon pre-dated the fracking by years.
Nevertheless, controversy has impacted the UK’s shale production.
In 2011, for example, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) imposed a year-long ban on fracking, after drilling in Lancashire by Cuadrilla was blamed for causing two tiny and completely harmless earth tremors.
Thankfully, one of Theresa May’s first moves as Prime Minister was to close DECC, signalling a determination to achieve what her predecessor David Cameron never did — “cut the green crap”.
It’s a start but she could do more. Already the legislation is in place for a fracking revolution: Last year, the Government decided shale exploration was of such overriding national importance that it now has the right to overrule local councils that try to stand in its way.
So the next thing Mrs May can do to show she means business is to instruct her Communities Secretary Sajid Javid to reverse Lancashire County Council’s planning rejection of drilling.
Mrs May must be seen as a champion for fracking, debunking the propaganda of the small cabal of vocal, well-funded green campaigners and hammer home the message that it is in our broader national interest to frack.
If, as she says, she really cares about the needs of ordinary working people, this is her quickest, cheapest way to help them.
