Liz Truss to Lift Ban on Fracking
Prime Minister Liz Truss is to lift a ban on fracking, with the first drilling licences in nearly three years expected to be issued as early as next week. The Guardian has the story – and ramps up the earthquake alarm.
The first drilling licences in nearly three years are expected to be issued as early as next week, sources said, in a move that will reignite claims of another broken 2019 Conservative manifesto pledge.
Given fears about spiralling energy bills, the new Prime Minister announced last week that she would “end the moratorium on extracting our huge reserves of shale”, which has been in force across England since November 2019.
A long-awaited report by the British Geological Survey (BGS) was promised to be published, but it has been held up owing to the Queen’s death. The report, seen by the Guardian, admits that forecasting fracking-induced earthquakes and their magnitude “remains a scientific challenge”.
It says there are still “significant existing knowledge gaps” and that problems remain with identifying potential new fracking sites that may be able to handle earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0.
Existing rules require drilling to stop if tremors of 0.5 or more are caused. But fracking companies are reportedly lobbying for that to be substantially increased.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the former Business Secretary who is now the Chancellor, asked the BGS in April to look into new techniques to help reduce the risk of earthquakes and their magnitude, and whether sites outside Lancashire could be better suited for drilling.
In its report, the BGS offers little evidence that there has been enough progress since the fracking ban to meet a 2019 manifesto promise that it would only be resumed if “the science shows categorically that it can be done safely”.
How serious though really is the earthquake worry? In the U.S., the states of Arkansas, California, Colorado, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming all undertake significant fracking, but there has been no word yet of any earthquake damage.
The Government claims gas could start flowing in less than six months, but others say it would take years and is far less accessible than once thought. I guess we’ll see who’s right soon enough.
Even once it starts flowing, though, it will do little to reduce bills – unless it is joined to some prioritising of the domestic market with our energy supply.
Worth reading in full.
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I once asked a wise man I knew, when you are faced with a situation that has to be turned around, but its so enormous that you don’t know where to start. How can you achieve success. He thought for a moment, and then he spoke. ‘How do you turn a super tanker around through 180 degrees? You do it 1 degree at a time.’
Liz is turning the tanker, setting out winnable battles that, in themselves seem nothing much, but will add up to 180 degrees if she keeps going. Keep going girl.!
Even better to adopt the Irish solution: don’t start from here.
So it is. We should not be starting from here.
I’d like to be a fly on the wall for her first audience with our non-political, completely impartial, definitely-not-interfering in politics King 🙂
Civil servants will think you can turn off and turn on gas supply like they change their nickers or order groceries from Waitrose. After it is not delivered in 6 months the usual suspects will ndemand:
1 we nationalise it
2 we tax it to death because the capitalists are exploiting it
3 cancel it because clearly it does not work.
They needed to get the public really frightened (sounds familiar?) of a cold and very expensive winter before announcing this, after previous slogans such as “I’m not backing fracking”. Weeks and weeks of appearing to do nothing, while getting the spin doctors to write scary headlines about energy bills were all part of this plan, to make people scream “Do something! Anything!”.
Incidentally, when somebody explained the purpose of spin doctors to me, way back in the Bliar years, they used as an example “Queen drops toffee paper in Millennium Dome”, as a possible headline to distract the public from something they want to bury. What was His Majesty’s leaky pen supposed to distract us from?
Why the green movement can never succeed
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/why-the-green-movement-can-never-succeed/
TCW
Will Nut Zero survive this winter?
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Will, you need to brush up on Seismology.
Tremors of Richter 0.5 are almost ubiquitous, cause no damage whatever and can only be detected with a sensitive Seismograph.
That’s why our old chum Ed Davey used this figure to effectively ban fracking. Of which he has frequently boasted. (Whilst on the payroll of a Solar energy company).
Richter is a logarithmic scale. So a Richter 4.0 tremor where most people WILL be aware and trivial plaster cracking may occur, happen quite regularly and are associated with quarry blasting, heavy machinery etc and with heavy transport (big trucks, locomotives). These tremors are 3,162 times as energetic as 0.5. They regularly were experienced from deep mining.
Zigactly!
More here, in case Will missed it:
https://www.netzerowatch.com/content/uploads/2022/02/Worstall-Restarting-Shale.pdf?mc_cid=5e53626c53&mc_eid=0989555968
Had they done this in Feb/March when it was blatantly obvious what was coming down the tracks, we could have had gas flowing this winter!
Still, credit where credit is due, Truss has not prevaricated on this one.
Earth tremors! So what? I was brought up 100 yards from a main road in a Glasgow, very modest, 100 year old, sandstone tenement. Past coal-mining in the area meant lintels were askew by inches; the vibration from HGVs reverberated throughout the building. 60 years later they have become prime property.
It’s not earthquakes that are the main problem with fracking. The most damaging aspect of this kind of extraction process (hydraulic fracturing) is the vast quantity of toxic sludge that results, when our waste-treatment infrastructure is less than equipped to treat this volume of by-product. It therefore has nowhere to go other than contaminating the very foundation by which we survive – our drinking water supplies!
Not only, that, the water demands of fracking plants are enormous because of the millions of gallons that must be regularly pumped at high pressure (along with toxic chemicals) into the ground to fracture the underlying rock to release the shale gas. This makes it not a particularly drought-friendly piece of kit. During the very dry period we had recently, where hose pipes were banned in a large portion of the UK, would these mega-gallons of water still be as liberally used up on extracting shale if these had been up and running at the time?
It seems like you’ve been reading too much green propaganda. Fracking uses some water, but I doubt it would be millions of gallons unless we had thousands of wells. There’s no reason why the water can’t be recycled and used over and over again. As for toxic chemicals, can you name any of them? Matt Ridely wrote a blog years ago showing that the chemicals used in fracking are all ones that can be found in an average kitchen, e.g. surfuctants that are found in soap powder or washing up liquid. Where are the pictures of vast quantities of toxic sludge produced by fracking in the U.S. If you want to see vast quantities of toxic sludge look at some of the pictures from China where 90% of the rare earth metals used in batteries, magnets for wind turbines etc. are refined.
This is true. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Admittedly, as you point out, other forms of mass-energy production come with all their own collateral damage to the environment. Even if you discount CO2 output from the fossil fuel industry, the exploitation of oil reserves whether marine or on land is likely just as problematic as fracking potentially is, for much the same reasons – the incapacity of the earth to absorb and neutralize the by-products. On speculation, the same is probably true of nuclear power plants, which, like all major energy-production facilities, probably have a very rapid throughput and shelf-life of materials, all of which have to be disposed of somehow (it’s less than likely that this disposal is sustainable).
BTW, most of the chemicals found in kitchen could be catastrophic if deployed on an industrial scale. That is why they’re primarily intended for domestic use. Several megatonnes of Fairy Liquid might just have some negative impacts on the health of agricultural soil, for example.
The obvious solution to NIMBYs is to offer them cut-price energy bills. Just see the opposition dropping away.
They are saying they want local authorities to be able to ask for fracking rights. I wonder if they will also allow authorities to deny fracking like Lancashire did but got overruled by the government.