Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Hayman and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Monday 16th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am grateful for that clarification. If the noble Lord is saying that the time has gone, that, it seems to me, is essentially a commercial and practical judgment. It may be right—I do not run a fracking company; I know very little in practice about fracking. It is possible that the time has gone in commercial terms, and that it might not be a sensible thing to do in current circumstances. None of that is grounds for ruling it out as a matter of statute and prohibiting it. It is complete nonsense to suggest doing that. We will leave fracking to one side for the moment.

I turn to Amendment 230, a much narrower and more technical probing amendment which relates to the composition of the domestic gas supply. It takes me back to my boyhood and the childhoods of a number of people in this Room, though not all, who might remember what life was like before we had North Sea gas pumped into our homes. We had town gas, which was produced from coal. Its content was a mixture of gases, including CH₄, CO, CO₂, H₂, higher-order hydrocarbons and phenols. The composition was adjusted according to the calorific value.

When we switched over to North Sea gas, the composition of the gas that we used became over-whelmingly methane, with a small amount of higher-order hydrocarbons. The switchover to using methane allowed the calorific value to be higher. Those of us with very long memories will recall that it was marketed as “high-speed gas”, which meant “hot”—it had a high calorific value, so you could cook that much faster. Moreover, we then put that composition into legislation, which I am grateful to the Library for finding for me: the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations 1996, which are referred to in my Amendment 230.

The result is that, today, a significant amount of gas that we could extract from the North Sea is not being extracted because it cannot be used in our domestic supply by law. In effect, a lot is going to waste. The proposal in this probing amendment is to ask the Government to reflect on this and consider whether, given the energy crisis we have been facing, it might not be sensible and possible to amend those regulations so that we could make use of many of these gases that are currently going to waste but could, none the less, be fed into our domestic system. It could mean that the calorific value would be a little lower in our cookers, so it might take a little longer to bake a cake—a number of television programmes might be affected by this in detail; the outcomes might change—but in terms of efficiency, at a time when we desperately need energy, it is certainly worth looking at.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

I have listened to the noble Lord with some interest, but those of us with long memories remember the dangers inherent in the gas that was used before the date he was talking about and the number of suicides that took place. Does he think there is a health and safety issue to consider before going back to those days and that sort of gas?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

The name of the regulations that I am suggesting we review is the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations, so I fully acknowledge that this is a question of safety, but it is not necessarily the case that these regulations, passed in 1996, that we are still adhering to could not be looked at to see whether, precisely as I say in my amendment, they could be

“safely amended to allow more efficient use of extracted … gas.”

It may be that they cannot but, nearly 30 years on, it would be helpful if the Government could look more closely at this.

My principal point in raising these amendments relates to Amendment 224. A bit like the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, earlier, I want to know whether the Government have a strategy for resilience. Do they contemplate the dependence on foreign supplies going on endlessly in very large measure, and what would they like to do about it? I think that an awful lot of people in this country were shocked to discover our level of dependency on imports and would like to hear that we are becoming more self-sufficient.