Revised Energy National Policy Statements

Baroness Foster of Oxton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

My Lords, black gold powered the industrial revolution. Where would we be today without it? Thank goodness the noble Baroness opposite, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, was not around at the time. To produce enough firewood in the 1860s equivalent in energy terms for domestic consumption would have needed 25 million acres of land a year—nearly the entire farmland of England.

Mining was dirty and dangerous, but it became acceptable because we needed the energy. In fact, my late grandfather was a coal miner in the Cronton colliery, which had its share of disasters. A hundred and sixty years on, we are in a very different place, because geopolitics is determining what we should do next; the debate has been taking place today in the other place. This is about not just energy supply but energy security. Successive Governments did not really see this coming. In fact, you could say that they did not see the wood for the trees. North Sea oil and gas lulled us into a false sense of security, and we should never have allowed our nuclear programme to practically wither and die. In 1997, the Blair Government failed to carry out their plans to renew four nuclear generators that we needed. A few years later, Gordon Brown sold off our new nuclear capability to Japan.

It was an interesting debate yesterday, and I welcomed the information from my noble friend the Minister on our plans to push ahead with Hinkley Point and our nuclear programme in general. I also believe that the contribution by Rolls-Royce for the mini nuclear pods is a fantastic step forward, but we need to go further. However, there is an elephant in the room that needs to be discussed. A few years ago, we thought it worth while to drill for shale gas in Lancashire—just one area out of many across the UK. It was estimated that there were 37 trillion cubic metres of gas in the Bowland fields, and extracting just 10% would have been enough for us to be self-sufficient for the next 50 years. The programme would have regenerated a number of areas and could have created 75,000 pretty skilled jobs. That is what you call a real step in levelling up, and it is only the tip of the iceberg. But it does not suit the agenda of many of the more extreme activists of the green lobby. Misinformation on safety and relentless lobbying—mostly by those who did not even live in the surrounding area—stopped the programme.

It is astonishing that our energy policy can be determined by Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and others who would like to take us back centuries. The irony is that those same people expect a roof over their head, central heating, hot water, mobile phones, iPads, washing machines, a dishwasher, a car and everything else that we all expect these days, as well as clean water and food on their plate. All that requires energy, which renewables alone will never be able to provide. As we know, we import 50% of our gas from abroad, mainly from Qatar and Norway, with some from Russia. If we continue along that road, by the end of the decade that will have risen to 70%. This winter, we imported shale gas from the USA, which this year will sink 19,000 wells—up from 16,000 only two years ago. The hypocrisy is nauseating, when you come to think of it.

Is fracking dangerous? No more than other extraction processes. Will there be the odd tremor? Well, probably, but technology has moved on in leaps and bounds, and there were many more tremors and much worse happened from deep coal mining, as I highlighted. To fill in those wells is positively absurd, and to carry on increasing our reliance on energy from abroad is equally absurd when it is beneath our feet.

I have welcomed the great strides that we have made for clean and green energy provision, and I echo and welcome the detailed analysis of the situation by my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Moynihan, but we need to look outside the box and keep an open mind on how we move forward. I therefore I ask my noble friend the Minister to take back these comments and to let us have a debate on the specific issue sooner rather than later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We are always open to finding new ways of speeding these things up, but you also have to take into account the concerns of local communities which have to put up with this infrastructure and try to mitigate the effects on them.

I return to the point that my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe asked me about heritage coal. I am very well aware of this issue; I am told that my noble friend Lady Bloomfield is a hero in the heritage railway community because she was able to write to them to say that heritage coal would still be available to them to operate their railways. There are many sources of coal apart from Russia. Significant quantities of coal are still produced in Germany and Poland, so I am confident that they will still be able to get the coal to power their excellent machines. I do not think anybody, even the most committed climate zealot, would object to the relatively small quantities that they would use for their heritage equipment.

[Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)]

I did not raise the issue of fracking necessarily as a short-term measure. With any energy, we know that it takes a long lead-in time to come to some sort of results. One of my key points was the fact that we are already importing 50%; by the end of the decade, that will rise to 70%. Neither am I talking about doing things without the consent of people who live locally. Of course, you must have the appropriate places to do these things. I have raised this issue so that we can start looking at it. It may be feasible in the not-too-distant future. because we just do not know at the moment what is going to happen.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My noble friend makes a good point. Supplies of gas from the North Sea are slowly declining. We will still have a need for fossil fuels, gas in particular, but of course the long-term trajectory of gas use will fall as we decarbonise the power supply and heating in homes. We might well not be importing larger quantities; so it would be a larger proportion of the smaller amount that we will require in future. However, we keep all these things under review and if all the environmental objections can be overcome and the difficult engineering processes solved, we are of course open to considering that. I just caution my noble friend that the difficulties are considerable and there are no easy solutions in this.

With that, I think I have dealt with most of the points that were on the subject of the national policy statements. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions.