By Paul Homewood
Britain’s fracking tsar launches a scathing attack on the government for caving into green zealots:
The Government’s fracking ‘tsar’ today reveals her immediate resignation in The Mail on Sunday.
Natascha Engel’s decision to walk away from such a high-profile role is driven, she says, by her dismay that Ministers are jeopardising Britain’s energy security because they would rather appease noisy green campaigners than listen to scientists’ advice.
The result, she says in an exclusive interview, is that government policy is strangling the UK shale gas industry at birth – despite overwhelming scientific evidence that fracking, if properly regulated, is totally safe.
Killing off this industry, says Ms Engel, a former Labour MP, will cause higher, not lower, greenhouse-gas emissions, as we are forced to rely on increased imports of gas.
Ms Engel, 52, tells The Mail on Sunday: ‘We are facing a huge challenge from climate change, which can only be dealt with by getting serious about the energy we use. But using our own gas instead of imports will get our emissions down.’
Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is demanding zero emissions by 2025 – bringing Central London to almost a standstill for much of the past two weeks with its ‘direct action’ protests – also campaigns against fracking. This week the group will meet Environment Secretary Michael Gove.
Ms Engel’s job – which has the official title Commissioner for Shale Gas – was to liaise between the Government, scientists, the industry and residents near potential fracking sites, and to give people factual information about the issue.
But last night, she revealed, she submitted an explosive resignation letter to Energy Secretary Greg Clark. It says she is stepping down because ‘a perfectly viable industry is being wasted because of a Government policy driven by environmental lobbying rather than science, evidence and a desire to see UK industry flourish’.
The Government, it adds, is ‘listening to a small but loud environmental movement that opposes in principle all extraction of fossil fuels. The campaign against fracking has been highly successful in raising the profile – and filling the coffers – of some campaign groups, but they do not represent local residents nor the wider population.’
The key reason for Ms Engel’s resignation is Mr Clark’s refusal to review the limit for earth tremors caused by fracking – 0.5 on the Richter scale. Tremors of this size, Ms Engel says, are so faint that detecting them requires highly sensitive equipment. The same rules do not apply to quarry blasting or construction piling, which can cause much bigger earth movements. They are also thousands of times weaker than the level 4 or 5 quakes geologists say are the smallest likely to damage buildings.
Ms Engel says: ‘A 0.5 tremor is much weaker than the rumble you might feel when walking above a Tube train. Yet if a frack unleashes a tremor rated 0.5 [caused when water is pumped underground into the shale to crack it and release the gas it holds] operators have to stop what they’re doing for 18 hours… this is making fracking impossible.’
The success of fracking in the US and Canada has led to an economic boom in these countries but also, crucially, lower emissions – because burning gas produces far less CO2 than burning coal, which it has partly replaced. In America and Canada, the limits imposed on the tremors that can legally be caused by fracking are much greater, according to Ms Engel: between 2 and 4.5 on the Richter scale.
Mr Clark has claimed that when Britain’s 0.5 limit was set in 2012, it was done ‘in consultation’ with the industry, implying that fracking firms supported it.
This, Ms Engel says, is untrue. ‘At the time, geologists and the industry fiercely objected,’ she said.
Today, UK drillers say they could operate with a limit of 1.5, ten times less than the lowest American ceiling (a level 2 tremor is ten times stronger than a level 1). When Mr Clark’s predecessor, Liberal Democrat Ed Davey, introduced the restriction, he issued a statement saying it would be reviewed when there was evidence that increasing the 0.5 limit would be safe.
Ms Engel says: ‘We have the evidence, but the only thing that’s stopping a review is the Government. Yet Mr Clark is refusing to budge and time is running out. If the Government continues to listen to campaign groups rather than science, then he is effectively putting an end to fracking in the UK.’ She adds: ‘Firms have invested hundreds of millions of pounds. They did all this on the basis that Government policy would be rational, that it would be scientific. But it’s not.’
A small minority of residents are opposed to fracking, she says.
‘But they are heavily outnumbered by people who want the benefits fracking could bring. In the areas where experimental wells have been drilled – Yorkshire, Lancashire and the East Midlands – historic industry has been destroyed, causing high levels of deprivation, and people tell me they desperately want industry jobs.
‘They are now very, very angry that a bunch of campaigners in London, backed it seems by the Government, say they can’t have them, because of almost undetectable earthquakes. Yet the Government is not listening to them.’ The irony, she says, is that by wrecking the shale gas industry, which the British Geological Survey says has the potential to supply Britain with gas for many decades, the Government is certain to increase emissions.
‘If you look at energy use as a whole, including heating and transport, gas accounts for 40 per cent of the total. There is simply no way renewables can fill that gap at the moment. We get less than five per cent of our total energy from wind and only 0.5 per cent from solar.’
Hence, she says, the inevitable consequence of killing the shale gas industry is that the quantity of gas burnt in UK homes, businesses and power stations imported from abroad will soar – and with it, the far bigger carbon footprint caused by the process of making liquified natural gas and transporting it here. Ms Engel says imported gas already costs £7 billion a year.
Moreover, by denying ourselves shale gas, ‘we are also depriving the Treasury of huge tax revenues, which could be spent on schools or the NHS’.
Ms Engel says she is also dismayed that groups such as XR, along with Swedish teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg, had no concrete solutions other than to say we need political upheaval.
‘I cannot understand why politicians would rather listen to a teenager who tells children not go to school because they will soon be dead rather than looking at ways of reducing our emissions by taking gas out of the ground here.
‘We should be giving our children a positive and hopeful message: telling them to go to school, go to university, to become scientists and innovators who can find the answers to climate change.’
As fracking tsar, she says: ‘I was really excited to be part of a vision for the future, that would help restore Britain’s reputation as a creative, forward-looking country which took both emissions targets and prosperity seriously.
‘But for reasons I cannot fathom, the Government’s approach is not leadership, but paralysis.’
Whatever your views on fracking, Britain’s dependence on natural gas is indisputable, as a few simple charts show:
1) Gas still accounts for 39% of the UK’s energy consumption, compared to a paltry 3% contribution from wind, solar and hydro:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/total-energy-section-1-energy-trends
2) We import 49% of our gas requirements:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-march-2018
3) Although the majority of imports come via pipeline from Norway, LNG still accounts for 17% of imports:
4) Across the EU as a whole, indigenous production only supplies about a fifth of demand. About a quarter of its gas comes from Russia.
The EU is also heavily reliant on supplies from Qatar, Nigeria and Algeria.
5) In the UK, household account for about a third of gas usage. But, significantly, demand in winter peaks at four times that of summer, for obvious reasons.
Gas supply can easily be adjusted up and down to meet this demand pattern, but for the electricity system to do the same would involve a massive increase in both generating and transmission capacity. To do so with a grid mainly reliant on intermittent renewable energy simply would not be practical, as it would raise the question of what you do with all of that surplus power in summer months.
Neither the government nor the eco zealots it seems to want into bed with have anything remotely resembling a practical plan of how to replace natural gas in our energy mix.
Which leaves us with two alternatives:
1) Make the best use of the gas resources we have.
2) Increase our reliance on imports from abroad.
I know which I would rather do.
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April 28, 2019 at 05:42AM
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