All over for fracking as firm told to plug shale gas wells

‘Abandoning any chance of levelling up’

TORY MPs last night protested after the only company to frack for shale gas in Britain was ordered to permanently plug and abandon its wells.

Energy company Cuadrilla was told by the Government’s Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) to seal two horizontal shale wells drilled near Blackpool.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a process in which liquid is pumped deep underground at high pressure to fracture shale rock and release trapped gas or oil.

It has been mired in controversy since 2011 after it caused two minor earthquakes in Lancashire, prompting a temporary ban on fracking in the UK. That was later lifted with controls put in place to prevent tremors. But many fear it can also cause water contamination, noise and traffic pollution.

Fracking at Preston New Road in Lancashire was suspended indefinitely after a record-breaking tremor measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale in August 2019. A few months later the Government announced a moratorium on shale-gas extraction.

Cuadrilla and Tory MPs last night hit out at the order, claiming domestic shale gas could combat the cost-of-living crisis. Cuadrilla chief Francis Egan said the UK was ‘spending billions of pounds annually importing gas’ and ‘emissions from importing gas are far higher than those from home-produced shale gas’.

Tory MP Craig Mackinlay, chairman of the Conservative Net Zero Scrutiny Group, said it was ‘utter madness’ to abandon the shale wells at the height of the energy crisis.

Tory former minister Steve Baker said: ‘We’re abandoning any chance we had of levelling up, solving the cost-of-living crisis and delivering on... net zero.’

But environmentalists welcomed the decision. Greenpeace UK’s head of climate Kate Blagojevic said the claim that shale gas could help with the energy crisis had been made a decade ago but ‘years later, all this industry has given us are a couple of holes in a muddy field and some minor earthquakes’.

Downing Street said shale gas was ‘not a short-term fix and it’s still unproven as a resource in the UK’, adding: ‘It would take years...before commercial quantities of shale gas could be produced.’