The Lords took a couple more evidence sessions on shale gas yesterday, parts of which were well worth watching. The first session, featuring an environmental consultant, somebody from the Institute of Directors and a pair from "Residents’ Action on Fylde Fracking", was mostly worth missing although I was intrigued by one of the anti-frackers. Tina Rothery turns out to have been an organiser for the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protests and revealed during the course of the hearings that she had spent most of the summer in Balcombe. This made me wonder to what extent she is actually a Lancashire resident, whether Fylde against Fracking is genuinely a movement of local residents or whether it is just a part of the green anti-capitalist movement.
The more interesting part (from 16:38 ish) was the second session with no-nonsense energy analysts in the shape of Liberum Capital's Peter Atherton, and two independents consultants, Peter Hughes and Philip Lambert. The take-home message was that the pace of shale development is too slow to make any difference to the impending energy crisis. At the current snail's pace we will not even know if there is economically extractable gas present before the storm is upon us, and the gearing up to full production capacity will take even longer than that.
The solution, all seemed to agree, was to deal with the decline in North Sea production. We have proven reserves, infrastructure and skills all available right now, but because of the insane fiscal regime for oil and gas in the UK these are being allowed to wither away.
It's funny how people say that capitalists are short-sighted.