Don’t worry – this shows the system is working!
After earthquake halts work, No10’s fracking expert says...
BRITAIN’S first ‘Fracking Tsar’ yesterday moved to calm fears after operations were suspended at the UK’s only active shale gas fracking site following an earthquake – just a fortnight after it was given the go-ahead. Former Deputy Commons Speaker Natascha Engel, appointed Shale Gas Commissioner by Theresa May two weeks ago, said Britain had the ‘strictest rules on fracking in the world’.
The decision by energy firm Cuadrilla to halt operations at its site near Blackpool after a tremor of 0.8 magnitude on the richter Scale showed the safeguards were working, she said.
The company said it planned to resume drilling for shale gas at the Preston New road site in Little Plumpton, Lancashire, today.
Fracking, which involves blasting water at high pressure underground to release gas, was stopped in Lancashire in 2011 after being linked with earthquakes. As a result, any tremor of 0.5 or above means fracking must be stopped while tests are carried out. Miss Engel, a former Labour MP, told the Daily Mail: ‘This shows that the system is working.
‘After the tremors in 2011, a very strict traffic light system was introduced – far stricter than anywhere else in the world.
‘The only other country as strict as we are has set the pause button at 1.5 because even that can hardly be felt on the surface.’
Environmental campaigners said yesterday’s stoppage showed fracking was ‘dangerous’. However, fracking supporters say the 0.5 level can be triggered by a passing bus. In the US, the maximum fracking temor levels range from 2.7 to 4.5.
Speaking a day earlier, Miss Engel used her first interview as ‘Fracking Tsar’ to accuse antifracking protesters of trying to ‘scare the living daylights’ out of people and criticised Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.
‘They paint themselves as being like local worried citizens,’ she said. ‘In fact they are using antifracking campaigns to stifle rational debate and boost their profile and funds.’
Miss Engel, 51, who is paid £48,000 a year, said she hopes to counter ‘disinformation’ about fracking. She plans to visit residents in areas where the controversial method of extracting shale gas is proposed and hold meetings in their homes ‘away from the ‘screaming and shouting at public meetings’.
Last week two people cemented their arms into a set of tyres in Little Plumpton to try to stop fracking. And three protesters jailed for climbing on lorries at the site were freed after a court quashed their sentences.
Miss Engel says fracking could help meet our carbon reduction targets, create tens of thousands of jobs, solve Britain’s energy needs for 50 years and generate enough cash to ‘solve the social care crisis and save the NHS on its own’. She first investigated it when drilling was proposed in her former North East Derbyshire constituency.
‘Mothers who had heard scare stories would be in my office weeping, saying their children were going to die,’ she said. ‘They’d been told flames would leap from kitchen taps, their houses would collapse in earthquakes.’
She was so alarmed at the level of fear that she set off to find a fracking site in Yorkshire. ‘When I drove there I could see a huge steel rig and garish piping in the distance and thought, “Blimey it’s massive,”’ she said.
‘It turned out to be Flamingo Land, a theme park! The “rig” was one of the biggest rides in Europe. The fracking site was so small I drove past it.’
‘Trying to stifle rational debate’