It looks as though we are going to finally get a look at the British Geological Survey's report on shale gas resources later today. The media seem to have got their hands on a press release and there are some big numbers being touted around:
UK shale gas resources may be far greater than previously thought, a report for the government says.
The British Geological Survey was asked to estimate how much gas is trapped in rocks beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire.
It said there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet at one site alone, but it is unclear how much could be extracted.
With UK demand at slightly less than 3 tcf per annum, that looks like very good news, but of course the figure of 1300tcf (assuming the reports are correct) is not what will ultimately be extractable. There's an interesting exchange of views about these figures on Twitter, with Greenpeace's Damian Kahya (an ex-BBC journo) saying that we should be using a figure of 4% and the BBC saying 10%. Nick Grealy notes that the average in the USA is 18%, and one has to recognise that this incorporates all the older wells, in which relatively primitive fraccing approaches were used. Cuadrilla have said that 15-20% will ultimately prove to be a conservative estimate, as the technology improves, and numbers as high as 40% have been mooted by industry insiders.
I'm not sure this will even make a difference though. If there really is 1300tcf at one site alone, the amount of gas in place in the whole country must be so huge as to make the recoverable percentage somewhat irrelevant.
[Updated - the 40% figure covers good parts of the shale - the bits you decide to exploit. Some parts of the shale will be so unsuitable for exploitation they will not be touched at all.]
Bishop Hill
The BGS report is here. Interestingly, it covers the Bowland Hodder region only, rather than the UK as a whole. So the 1300tcf figure is only part of what's out there.