Rob Edwards of the (Glasgow) Herald is taking a pop at unconventional gas once again, this time revealing that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has declared that there is a "high risk" of aquifer contamination from deep boreholes.
The story is based on an internal SEPA document obtained under freedom of information legislation - by whom we are not told, but one assumes that, as is normal for Rob Edwards articles, the ultimate source is Friends of the Earth.
The key words "high risk" do indeed appear in the text - indeed they are in the very first sentence, but there is actually rather less here than meets the eye, as the paper concludes that the answer is to shift holes in the ground that are more than 200 metres deep to a different regulatory regime. This hardly appears to represent what you would do when facing impending armageddon.
One other thing stood out to me in the document.
This [regulatory] approach will also apply to deep boreholes (>200m) drilled for geothermal energy recovery, in which there is increasing interest.
The reference to geothermal energy reminded me of an article Rob Edwards had written at the end of last year, in which he extolled the benefits of geothermal energy for Scotland's future:
As much as a third of the heat needed to keep Scotland warm could be provided by tapping geothermal energy from old coal mines across the central belt, a major new study for the Scottish government has concluded.
Warm water piped up from abandoned mine shafts between Glasgow and Edinburgh and in Ayrshire and Fife could help heat many thousands of homes and other buildings for decades, researchers say. They are urging ministers to embark upon an ambitious bid to make geothermal energy a major new source of clean, renewable power within a few years.
And as ever, Friends of the Earth were right behind the Edwards' viewpoint:
Dr Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “It is a nice irony that some homes that used to be heated by coal are now being heated by water from old mine workings, and it would be great to see this idea deployed on a very wide scale.”
All this enthusiasm was centred on a report by the British Geological Survey, which examined "deep" geothermal resources in Scotland, with "deep" defined as more than 200 metres below the surface. It concluded that if you extracted warm water from all the old mined areas in Scotland - some 4800 km2 - using boreholes at a spacing of four per square kilometer, you could indeed meet a third of the country's demand for heat, at least in theory. Unfortunately, the BGS's strongly worded caveat, indicating that practical heat extraction was likely to be considerably lower didn't make it to the Edwards' paean to the technology.
And there you see the problem. To exploit the potential energy source of old mine workings you would have to drill the same "high-risk" deep boreholes that you would need for coalbed methane, but many, many more of them.
I hate to be a party-pooper, my green friends, but you really need to get your story consistent.