Diluting the truth

The first [concern about fracking is that it] uses huge amounts of water that must be transported to the fracking site, at significant environmental cost.

BBC on water requirements for shale gas operations

Estimates indicate that the amount needed to operate a hydraulically fractured shale gas well for a decade may be equivalent to the amount needed to water a golf course for a month; the amount needed to run a 1,000 MW coal-fired power plant for 12 hours; and the amount lost to leaks in United Utilities’ region in north west England every hour (Moore 2012).

The Royal Society on water requirements for shale gas operations

Truck movements could be minimised where water supply can be obtained from the public water mains, or by a licensed abstraction from a nearby waterbody.

Scottish Government expert panel on water requirements for shale gas operations

The long grass

The Scottish Government has announced a moratorium on new unconventional oil and gas operations, pending a public consultation, a public health impact assessment, and changes to the regulatory regime.

This reeks of the political classes kicking an awkward political football into the long grass, at least until the election is over. It is also of note that the moratorium seems not to cover fracking for geothermal energy.

Remarkably, the UKOOG, the industry body for the onshore oil and gas industry, has welcomed the move. I wonder if the time for emollience has passed. Shipping gas in from overseas rather than producing it locally is foolish in the extreme. The Scottish Government is actively damaging the economy and the environment.

Why not just say so?

Update on Jan 29, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The Scotman reckons there are now serious question marks over the long-term future of Grangemouth and all because shale has become a political football.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that yesterday’s announcement by Fergus Ewing, the Scottish energy minister, was a simple attempt to trump a Labour position which itself was a misguided piece of political posturing.

Trouble in Eden

In a shock announcement, the Eden Project has revealed that it is going to start hydraulically fracturing rocks beneath its site in a bid to extract geothermal energy. They are keen to emphasise the differences between what they are going to be doing and shale gas operations but a glance suggests these are largely distinctions without a difference.

Fracking the rock to create a geothermal heat exchanger is not the same as fracking for shale gas. We will not be releasing fossil fuels for burning. Geothermal developments are much deeper and in granite so there is much less chance of surface damage or contamination to the water table. We have no plans to use proppants or associated viscous chemical fluids to keep the circulation open. France encourages geothermal development but has a moratorium on fracking for gas.

The bit about the developments being "much deeper" than shale is not true. The image on the Eden project puts the depth at something like 4 or 5 km, which is pretty much the same depth at which the Bowland shale sites will be operating. Non-use of proppants - i.e. sand - seems to me to be a diversion rather than a meaningful distinction.

I also wonder if the planners are going to be presented with a dilemma over the noise levels:

Rigs are hired from the oil industry, so drilling will take place 24 hours a day to minimise the cost. It will take around 20 weeks per well. The rig will be one specifically for use in a populated area and heavily soundproofed, producing up to 45dBA at 200m. During operation, the generator will make a constant noise: a maximum of 30dBA at a distance of 200m. But because buildings are low, the noise can be tempered by landscaping.

Readers will recall that similar noise levels were deemed entirely unacceptable for shale gas operations.

Antifracking: the Russian connection

Via Instapundit comes an article from the Washington Free Beacon which reports that money is being funnelled to anti-fracking activists by a mysterious company in Bermuda with links to the Russian oil business:

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

The findings are based on a report by the US Environmental Policy Alliance. I don't think a fire has been found yet, but the quantities of smoke are prodigious.

Update on Jan 28, 2015 by Bishop Hill

A little Googling shows that Hans-Joerg Rudloff, the chairman of Marcuard, a UK company named in the report, is a former director of Barclays Capital and a close associate of Suleiman Kerimov, who is a significant shareholder in Gazprom.

The old fabulist of Fleet Street

Sometimes the sheer brazenness of the Guardian can take you completely aback. Having spent the last five years hyping every tall story from the environmentalists to high heaven and back again the old fabulist of Fleet Street has come up with a portentous editorial saying that the government is ignoring "genuine anxieties" that people have about this "novel" process.

Bribes and bullying are no way of dealing with genuine anxieties about a novel process

To the extent that the anxieties are genuine this is simply because environment correspondents across the media, but particularly at the Guardian, have been systematically misleading the public. As if to provide support for this view, the suggestion that fracking - a process that has been used for half a century without anyone noticing - is "novel" is simply untrue.

A glance at the rest of the article brings further examples, such as the endless repeated canard that warming above 2°C is somehow dangerous. No it isn't. No it isn't. No it isn't. No it isn't.

A big day for shale gas

Today sees Parliament consider an amendment to the Infrastructure Bill that would introduce a moratorium on unconventional gas wells in the UK. To coincide with the vote, the Environmental Audit Committee has produced one of its normal sham reports saying that industrial activity will all end in disaster, based as always on a series of interviews with environmentalists and pretty much nobody else. In fact, as Emily Gosden in the Telegraph amusingly notes, they have outdone themselves today:

The EAC also cites evidence from Paul Mobbs, a self-described “freelance campaigner, activist, environmental consultant, author, lecturer and engineer” and former “electrohippie”, who runs a “dysorganisation” called the ‘Free Range Activism Website’.

It's good to know that the views of the electrohippies are not being overlooked.

I gather that the commmittee's chairman Joan Whalley has been all over the BBC this morning, no doubt given the usual free pass by the eco-nutters who present programmes for the corporation.

I'll update this page throughout the day as news comes in.

Update on Jan 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

James Verdon notes how Whalley and her colleagues have weighed up the evidence.

The EAC report cites the "Frack Free Balcombe Residents Association":

"The Frack Free Balcombe Resident’s Association raised concerns that 'wells or fractures intersecting with natural faults could easily become conduits for leaking gases and liquids'

but completely ignores the evidence provided by myself and Professor Kendall, which provides extensive documentation from peer-reviewed scientific literature that this is extremely unlikely to happen.

Update on Jan 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

INEOS seem a bit annoyed with the EAC:

The UK needs Shale gas and we know that INEOS has the skills to safely extract it from the ground without damaging the environment. We have committed to public consultation and to share 6% of the entire revenue from any of our Shale gas wells with the local community. Without Shale gas, UK manufacturing is starting to collapse so we need to kick start the Shale gas industry, not put it on hold”.

Update on Jan 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The debate in the House of Commons is now under way here. Julian Huppert vocal in favour of banning fracking, Tim Yeo speaking against.

16:30 My impression is that Labour are going to get some regulations to console their supporters. I'm guessing that means that the banning amendments will fail.

Plans coming to fruition

The tsunami of deception and misinformation that has characterised the greens' response to the prospect of an unconventional oil and gas industry in the UK seems to have had the desired effect:

Fracking should not be allowed to take place at two sites in Lancashire due to concerns about noise and traffic, the council's planning officer has said, in a major blow to the Government's plans for shale gas development.

Proposals by Cuadrilla to drill and frack at Preston New Road and Roseacre Wood should both be refused by councillors at a vote next week, the official said, in documents published on Wednesday.

Fracking at both sites would lead to "unacceptable" levels of noise pollution for neighbouring properties, the planning officer said.

This is pretty remarkable stuff. Preston New Road (here) is a field next to an A-road. The idea that the noise levels will be unacceptable is patently absurd.

Scotsman fracking conference

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee are currently hearing from the usual suspects on the subject of unconventional oil and gas. No doubt they will hear that it will be an unmitigated disaster, is wanted by nobody and will never happen anyway. Meanwhile,  Alex Salmond's exit as the leader of the SNP has brought a new leader who is apparently not quite so in thrall to the greens and within weeks of taking over the announcement of a task force to support the oil and gas industry.

It's all nicely poised. And with consummate timing, the Scotsman has organised a conference on the very subject of unconventional hydrocarbons. This move will no doubt infuriate the green fraternity, but it has to be said it's high time the industry started to try to make things happen.

Here are the details.

Click to read more ...

Walport bashes the Guardian

A few weeks ago Adam Vaughan wrote an article in Guardian that suggested that a report by Mark Walport had compared the risks of fracking to thalidomide and asbestos. Vaughan's contribution to the debate has now received an extremely cutting response from Sir Mark (see update at link above):

The Guardian article that linked fracking with thalidomide and asbestos is a florid example of what my report argued most strongly against. It confuses arguments about science with value propositions. It selected one sentence from one evidence paper, quoted it in part, and in doing so misrepresented both the report and indeed the evidence paper itself.

Marvellous stuff. I just don't quite understand why Sir Mark has chosen this moment to speak out about Guardian Eco playing fast and loose with the facts. They do much worse than this on an almost daily basis.

Why now?

Environmental risks of fracking

The House of Commons is to hold an inquiry into the environmental risks of fracking.

Submissions of written evidence are invited addressing the following points:

• The risks from fracking operations in the UK, including potential risks to water supplies and water quality, emissions, habitats and biodiversity, and geological integrity
• Necessary environmental safeguards, including through the planning/permitting system
• The implications for our carbon emissions reduction obligations

It's being held under the auspices of the Environmental Audit Committee, so I think it's fair to say that it will be a complete farce.

Systematic deception

Friends of the Earth Scotland are at it again (or should that be "still"), issuing a letter to Fife Council about the possibility of unconventional fossil fuels being extracted in the county.

Here are a few of the highlights:

There is also alarming evidence about the potentially devastating public health impacts for communities living in and near gas fields. Communities living near gas fields in Australia complain of respiratory problems, rashes and irritated eyes.^iv An investigation by a concerned GP in early 2013 of 38 households in close proximity to coal seam gas wells in Tara, Queensland, found that 58% of residents reported definite adverse health effects related to gas drilling and a further 19% were uncertain.^v Symptoms include breathing difficulties, rashes, joint and muscle pains, nausea and vomiting, and spontaneous nosebleeds.

Click to read more ...

Windfarm boss funds antifracking challenge

Via commenter Tomo, we learn that windfarm millionaire Dale Vince was funding Frack-free Balcombe's application for judicial review of West Sussex County Council's decision to grant planning permission to Cuadrilla.

Great news – we now have all the money we need for our judicial review. Last week we explained how we needed to have £10,000 available in the event of our losing the judicial review and having to pay WSCC’s costs. Ecotricity has kindly stepped forward and sent us £10,000. FFBRA will hold this in our bank account ring fenced to either return in the event we win our judicial review or to use to pay any costs awarded against us if we lose. This is tremendous news.

Click to read more ...

Judge: rule of law challenged by greens

The tactics of the less reputable members of the environmental fraternity has long been to prevent any sort of industrial activity by making the cost of policing their protests so high as to wear public opinion into submission. One has to say that this approach has not been entirely unsuccessful.

It was interesting then to see the comments of Mr Justice Gilbart in rejecting FrackFree Balcombe's application for judicial review of West Sussex Council's decision to allow planning permission to the Cuadrilla project. There is a BBC report of the hearing here, but strangely the news of its rejection doesn't seem to have made the cut.

Click to read more ...

Valuing "subsidies"

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the report by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International, which claimed implausibly that the UK was delivering considerable subsidies to the oil industry.

Since then, I have been having a useful exchange of emails with Sam Pickard, one of the report's authors in which I attempted to understand how these figures had been arrived at. Sam pointed me to the section in the report on definitions of subsidies (p.23-27), which turns out to be four pages of masterly obsfuscation in which they never really quite get round to explaining how they define a subsidy.

Click to read more ...

To frack or not to frack?

Yesterday MPs had a short debate in Westminister Hall on the subject of fracking. The proceedings were led by the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, who provided - presumably unintentionally - a handy list of every piece of misinformation on the subject of shale gas extraction that is still doing the rounds. There was also this amusing intervention from Graham Stringer, referring to Caroline Lucas's contribution:

The hon. Lady uses as a basis for opposing fracking the fact that we will not meet our emissions targets. So what? We are hitting our emissions targets—[Interruption.] Well, I will explain it to the hon. Lady, because she is in a fantasy world. In hitting our emissions targets, we are responsible for more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere than we were before, because of embedded carbon coming in through industrial manufactured goods from China and elsewhere. The hon. Lady’s policy does not help the climate or reduce carbon dioxide. Her policy is about deindustrialisation, which is responsible for increasing the costs of industrial goods in this country by 9%, putting people out of work, and for increasing the cost of domestic energy, depending on how it is counted—by and large, it is not counted properly—by between £50 and £120 a year. The hon. Lady is concerned about carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, but that is increasing because we are effectively subsidising imports from China and India.

I'm not sure that the debate went anywhere, but it was interesting nevertheless.