As ordinary people struggle, pure policies are killing Britain’s gas industry – Rise up for it?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h / t JoNova; Britain has 200 trillion cubic feet of fragile gas in Lancashire. But the climate is obsessed The British government would rather pay a hefty price to Russiarather than developing the resources available in the country.

How the UK fracking industry was regulated as unsuitable

February 13, 2022, 5:00 pm
Andrew Montford

This week, mining company Cuadrilla announced that it will permanently close two of its shale fields in Lancashire, after the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) announced that shale gas operators must seal wells they drilled and returned the land to nature.

That is, on the face of it, a very strange step to take at the moment. Of course, the wells haven’t produced any gas for a number of years since environmentalists launched a scare campaign against the industry. It’s an astonishing campaign for its brazenness. Small earthquakes recorded near wells, of perfectly normal sizes, such as the mining industry or in geothermal energy developments have been renamed ‘earthquakes’ by activists. The chemicals used – all of which have been approved as completely safe by the Environment Agency – have been declared hazardous poisons. In one particularly egregious case, householders were handed leaflets claiming that the gas companies would use industrial amounts of a carcinogen known as ‘silicon dioxide’. It’s sand, in common parlance.

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In this case, how can we explain the decision to seal the well? Actually, it makes sense if you look at OGA’s assigned task. In this particular document you will not find any mention of any duty to ensure that the operator does not cut corners. Nothing about guaranteeing that they deliver to consumers, or even anything about national energy security (another pressing issue, given Mr. Putin’s machinations). To replace, The role the government has given it has turned total around providing Net Zero. To put it bluntly, OGA is more about shutting down the industry than regulating it.

When the domestic energy bill price cap is raised over the next few weeks, it’s likely there will be a lot of outrage. If people knew that the government’s political cowardice was making things worse, a major political backlash would ensue.

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Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-britain-s-fracking-industry-was-regulated-into-irrelevance

The rupture has the potential to cause a small Earthquake of 1.5 on the Richter scale – too small to notice. I challenge anyone to actually notice an Earthquake below 2-3 Richter without sensitive instruments. The only earthquake I’ve ever noticed was a 5.4 earthquake. At the time, I didn’t even realize it was an Earthquake – for a few seconds it was like a sudden gust of wind, all the trees starting to rustle. Then it stopped. I’ve been to other Earthquakes, but that’s my only experience of noticing something out of the ordinary during the event.

The Richter scale is logarithmic. Each integer on the scale is 31.7 times stronger than the previous integer. The 5.4, which I barely noticed, is 700,000 times stronger than the 1.5 earthquakes that environmentalists claim is a problem.

A lot of Britons think embracing Net Zero is the right direction. But even if you think gas is just a short-term stopgap, it certainly makes more sense to allow Britain’s domestic resources to be exploited until they are no longer needed, rather than pour money into President Putin’s Ukraine peacekeeping budget.