Fracking was always doomed to fail
13th February 2019 | Commercial Energy
The fracking industry was doomed to fail from the start and now activists are putting the final nail in its coffin. The end is night for fracking in the UK, not that it ever particularly got started.
Regulators at the government’s Department of Business, Energy, Innovation and Skills (BEIS) recently denied fracking pioneer Cuadrilla’s request to raise earthquake limits. This is a hammer blow to the company’s prospects of profitably extracting shale gas at their Preston New Road (PNR) site in Lancashire. There is little move that Cuadrilla could do to portray itself as the arch-villain of the climate movement as they demand the Government allow them to induce more earthquakes at their site between Blackpool and Preston. All to make a quick profit.
Fracking
Their demand comes after fracking just 5% of the well at PNR since beginning horizontal drilling on 15 October 2018. They have induced 57 earth tremors between then and February 2019. BEIS state that while they support fracking, they have set existing regulations in consultation with the industry.
You can’t help but expect that even this callous Tory government have woken up to the deep unpopularity of fracking. By limiting Cuadrilla’s expansion at this stage, time is being run down until a Labour government ban it all together. It may even come with a new Tory leader in an attempt to appear “green”. Polling in a BIS report in December 2018 showed that only 13 percent of the public support fracking in the UK. A peak of now 35 percent oppose.
The gap has only widened since 2014. There is nothing about fracking that cultivates popular support. The more the public learn about fracking, the more they oppose it. The industry often argues for its existence under the guise of energy independence from big, bad, scary Russia. In reality, less than one percent of the UK’s gas comes from Russia.
More information available on the website below
https://theecologist.org/2019/feb/13/fracking-was-always-doomed-fail-writes-chris-saltmarsh