Why Britain’s fracking ban must be scrapped

Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, has announced that a Reform government would end Britain’s ban on fracking, which has been in place since 2019.

Fracking refers to the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock in order to recover gas and oil. Over the past couple of decades, politicians and environmentalist NGOs have raised concerns that fracking could lead to seismic activity, chemical contamination of local water supplies, the loss of millions of gallons of local water resources and an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. Tice does not share such concerns. ‘We’ve got potentially hundreds of billions of energy treasure in the form of shale gas’, he said. It would be ‘financially negligent to a criminal degree… not to extract it’.

Tice’s announcement has been met with the usual alarmist claims. There have been warnings about potential earthquakes (a concern so scientifically challenged, it can be all but dismissed), and about the contamination of local water supplies.

Contamination – especially the radioactive sort – certainly needs to be guarded against. But data from the US suggest that its incidence from fracking is relatively low. In a nutshell, our national perception of the dangers of fracking is based on little more than fear-mongering from the green lobby.

Such alarmism is nothing new. In 2012, the deep-green International Energy Agency proclaimed that, in the absence of carbon capture and storage, ‘no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels’ could be consumed before 2050, if the world was to avoid increasing global temperatures by two degrees Celsius. Two years later, the then Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, made headlines worldwide when he described ‘unburnable’ carbon as stranded assets – that is, as assets that have lost their economic value prematurely due to climate-related factors. Soon enough, the Guardian and the BBC took up the cudgels against the unburnables, warning us that their continued extraction would prove ‘catastrophic’.

Speaking to the BBC following Tice’s announcement, Michael Bradshaw, a professor of global energy at Warwick Business School, claimed the complex geology of the shale basins in the UK would make gas very difficult and costly to extract. The BBC itself made its own stance on fracking clear with a wink and a nudge, pointing out that the method’s controversial history ‘shows it won’t be easy…’. ‘If a Reform government does pivot back to fracking in 2029’, the Beeb concluded, ‘it might find itself out of step in a world that’s trying to go green’.

If fracking ‘won’t be easy’ in the UK, that has far more to do with legislation than with science, profitability or productivity. Indeed, if it were truly so difficult to extract gas from British land, the successful extraction of hydrocarbons from the North Sea, which has gone on for decades, would never have been possible, either.

Of course, the geology of the UK does differ from that of the US (currently the world champion when it comes to fracking). Though less than 10 per cent of Britain is considered urbanised, re-routing existing roads and traffic around fracking sites promises to be a bigger problem than it is in the States. But the way to find solutions to such issues is, and always has been, to try things out – an endeavour that past blanket bans on fracking have prevented.

Tice vows that a Reform government would work with fossil-fuel firms and use new extraction techniques to explore shale gas at two independently monitored fracking wells. While the nature of these ‘new techniques’ remains a mystery, his aspirations to innovate are commendable.

For now, a media consensus prevails – that fracking is just too damned dangerous. ‘Keep it in the ground’ runs the braindead refrain – a slogan that sums up both the ignorance and indifference of our elites when it comes to harnessing the natural energy supply of these islands for the benefit of their people.

The great irony is that this desire to avoid fracking at all costs means UK energy secretary Ed Miliband is relying on the US, Norway and Qatar for fossil fuels. This throws any notion of energy independence out of the window. Critics say that Donald Trump’s every policy is determined by the last aide he spoke to. In Miliband’s case, policy is determined by the last right-on think-tank, academic or elite eco-plonker he has consulted.

If we refuse to broaden our minds when it comes to energy, the result will be less of it for Britain – and at much higher expense. Keeping the ban on fracking is far more reckless than lifting it would be.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen