Fracking, should it happen in the UK or not?
With the Scottish Government deciding that there should be no fracking in Scotland it poses a couple of questions on what is fracking and is it really that bad.
The Scottish Government decision could be a decision that comes back to haunt them as in the immediate terms it would appear the that work with Ineos in terms of legal agreements were signed and the company had started acquiring land. Let’s leave this to run its course but Scotland is not alone in their unilateral ban but we do expect some fall out over this.
Fracking is based on releasing gas from rock fissures using drilling and pumping pressurised water to break and release the shale gas. The gas is trapped, similar to how oil is created, based on millennia of rock deposits trapping vegetation and from a time pre-dinosaur. The process of forming coal, oil or gas is fundamentally the same whether it is from under the sea bed or on land, it is a pressurised environment where gas is the bi-product and finds rock pockets where it has sat for thousands of years. The vegetation has become oil or coal and the gas sits above it. A good analogy is where you boil a kettle and the steam escapes through the spout, if it was sealed of the steam would be trapped.
The second analogy would be the concerns over earthquakes when the rock is fractured by the pressurised water, which in turn could set of a series of tremors and subsequent reactions. Splitting a log by hammering a spike into it will make it fracture on the weakest points or through faults in the structure. Yet one thing to consider is that with a gas it will always escape through a path of least resistance, i.e. with fracking the route the water has come is the most likely escape. So, through geological surveying the predictability can be very much determined and also consideration to the depth of the process, the UK does not sit on or close to a tectonic plate boundary when earthquakes are mentioned it is never going to be the same as a natural earthquake. Therefore, minor tremors may happen but in most cases these will be isolated and of magnitude not to cause damage.
The third point to consider is what extraction currently takes place and where? In a recent article in the Scotsman newspaper around 30 wells have been drilled in Central Scotland over the last 20-years with no impact whatsoever. These wells extract gas sitting in natural pocket or fold in the rock. There is obviously both oil and gas extraction in the North Sea with exploratory drilling now on the west coast. Scotland also has a long tradition of coal mining for centuries, open cast, mine shaft and with horizontal mining under the Firth of Forth. In conclusion, the ban can only be based on the process of cracking the rock.
The Green agenda is also a consideration not to be ignored but equally there must be a realisation that the human dependency on fossil fuels is not just fuels for heating and driving your car. Plastics, beauty products, paints, technology goods, etc, etc. are all dependent of this industry and we do not have switch that can be turn off the demand for these products. So, we have wind and wave farms that generate electrical power but what about when the wind stops or the metal resources used in the bearing mechanisms runs scarce? The point is there is not just one answer to our dependency on hydrocarbons and any replacement will be in decades or centuries not in a few years.
The final overarching consideration is safety and what has happened in the US has been the fatal incidents have been caused through transport and in a very few cases unregulated extraction. The difference though is the land ownership in the US is different. Look at the title deeds of your house and you will see that you own the land the house sits on but not the mineral rights to what is under the ground, unless you are maybe the Queen.
Over the past 50-years the hydrocarbon or oil industry has become one of the most highly regulated industries in the UK. Health and safety is at the forefront of any commercial operation of this nature and licensing will also protect who and who cannot carry out fracking. Do you think that the safety of the process will be compromised, corners cut, etc.?
As with all new industries what is required is caution and the geological structure is different to the USA. Equally the deposits will in the main bigger but fewer of them based on rock structures and historical deposit formations. The challenge as a government and as a business is balancing the books. If you can generate wealth by other means and import then fantastic, if you can’t then the economic impact is going to be significant with our dependency on hydrocarbons. Maybe the Scottish Governments decision was a bit premature and trial fracking projects initiated to answer once and for all what is the impact of fracking in the UK. Equally England and other parts of the UK should initiate projects and the data analysed across the country as a whole.
