Gas prospector IGas has announced that there could be huge quantities of shale gas in the area it has been licensed to explore (story here).
The company's licences cover an area of 300 sq miles across Cheshire.
It had previously said it had about nine trillion cubic feet of shale gas. It now estimates that the volume of "gas initially in place" could range from 15.1 trillion cubic feet to 172.3 trillion cubic feet - nearly 20 times more.
To put that in perspective, UK demand is currently about 3TCF per annum, so we are talking about a lot of gas. Of course, there's the question of how much is extractable, but this is still very good news.