Energy at home

THE VERY word sounds designed to shock, and it really can make the earth move. But there are serious reasons why fracking is likely to be part of Britain’s future. The caprice of global markets, which Vladimir Putin does much to emphasise, puts a premium on sourcing some energy at home.

The effects of climate change creep ever closer to the horizon, and if the UK is to curb emissions, then – on top of scaled-up renewables and reduced waste – we’ll need cleaner hydrocarbons to burn. Coal is the dirtiest of the lot.

So we can’t assume that all the gas that’s dormant in British rocks can simply be left to lie. Ideally, its potential value would be carefully weighed against ugly wells and other risks, with meticulous care taken to head off the serious dangers to the water supply that cavalier fracking could pose.

But as the government opens the bidding for licences to extract shale gas, there is little faith that all the delicate balancing required will be accomplished. Matthew Hancock, the energy minister spearheading the dash for underground gas, has a record of petitioning against windfarms, encouraging fears that he regards fracking not as complementing but as substituting for renewables.

The mood of frenzy in Whitehall is intensified by a tendency for the fracking firms, with Westminster links sometimes burnished through party donations, to push things to the very limit of whatever licence they are granted.

What a way to manage a natural resource which should, quite literally, be conceived as common wealth. The millions of Norwegians who today benefit from that country’s great sovereign wealth fund are surely grateful for the fact that their forbears were determined that its oil should be exploited for the common good.

How much better if Britain’s shale could be harnessed, not by avaricious corporates promising to pay 1 percent of revenues to the local area, plus whatever taxes can’t be avoided, but instead by public enterprise. Fracking could then be for the exclusive benefit of the community, and to the extent that the community wills it.