Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Grand Committee

This brings me to my amendment to the Government’s new clause. Subsection (5) of that clause refers to Scotland. I have no doubt that my noble friend the Duke of Montrose will enlighten us on this, but all the preceding subsections of that clause refer simply to exploiting deep geothermal energy, without circumscribing the purpose for which it is to be used. Subsection (5) confines it in Scotland to where the “sole, or main, use” of a site is “the generation of electricity”. I cannot understand why. Can they not use geothermal for heat purposes in Scotland? This subsection must have been put in for some purpose, but for the life of me I have not been able to discover what it is—nor, I must say, have those advising me. This impact may be the result of some technicality of devolution, but in Scotland, under this clause, or using the facilities provided under this clause, geothermal can be used only for the production of electricity. I would be very interested to know what lies behind the need for this subsection. I commend this amendment to the Committee.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s amendments. They are critical to allow the shale gas industry to get on with the job of extraction. Furthermore, these amendments involve no disruption to families or communities.

The Government have said that the current rules for agreeing subsurface land access are time-consuming, uncertain and costly, as my noble friend mentioned. Currently, landowners own the land to the centre of the earth. This means that companies involved in shale gas have to negotiate for access to land thousands of metres below the surface, where there is no possible impact to households. However, given that lateral wells could extend for several kilometres, this could involve hundreds or thousands of individual negotiations and make the industry unworkable. On top of this, Greenpeace has set up a campaign—I believe it is called Wrongmove—specifically designed to use this legal loophole to stall the industry by asking people to not allow land access rights. It is important that we get a move on with shale extraction; such delaying tactics will slow the process right down.

These amendments are welcome. They would bring shale into line with other industries, such as coal and telecommunications, which already drill and lay pipes below people’s homes at a much shallower depth. The measures apply only to drilling 300 metres or more below the surface, and the proposals will not impact the robust regulations for shale gas drilling. The Royal Society has concluded that the industry can be undertaken safely. My noble friend the Minister mentioned that it will not affect people on the surface. Indeed, if people on the surface can actually detect that somebody is drilling a mile down beneath their land, they will be in such a state of technological advance relative to other human beings that I am sure they will be able to make a fortune out of that ability to detect fracking. However, I wish that legislation in this area would not insist on the word “petroleum” to refer to everything other than petrol. I appreciate that there are some technical reasons, but it really does confuse matters.

I am very much in support of these amendments.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

My Lords, I shall comment on baseline monitoring. We need to learn from other monitoring schemes that are already in place as a result of regulatory regimes and the planning system.

There are two issues here. First, the 12-month period may not be required for methane monitoring but it certainly is for biodiversity monitoring, which is also mentioned in one amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. Too often, I have seen planning appeals and inquiries get hideously beached as a result of inadequate 12-month monitoring of biodiversity impact. If a species is present only at certain times of the year, it is quite difficult to do a baseline account of it if you are doing that in a season when the species is not present and is not expected to be present. That causes delays in planning processes. It is important to make it very clear that some of these impacts and baselines can be dealt with only on a 12-month basis.

I accept the commendation by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, of the work done by the BGS and other statutory agency baseline surveys and ongoing monitoring processes. However, the other point of principle we ought to regard as important is the need to make commercial organisations that want to undertake commercial activities responsible for ensuring that the baseline monitoring that needs to happen before they begin is undertaken—and undertaken at their expense. That is an important principle commonly adopted in many regulatory regimes and in much of the planning system. We must not move away from that. It is important that the commercial organisations get their heads around what the issues of their impact are before they start to put forward their propositions, rather than relying on somebody else’s baselines and not really understanding, when their propositions come forward, what they will need to monitor and how they will need to monitor it. That is an absolutely fundamental principle.

[Lord Borwick]

My Lords, I entire agree with the noble Baroness when she says that the task is to increase people’s confidence in this process of fracking, but I am absolutely certain that the 12-month baseline suggested here is not the right solution, because of the work done by the British Geological Survey mentioned by my noble friend Lord Jenkin. I understand that it was published on Monday 6 October as an interim study and found in its conclusions that background methane in aquifers is generally low and that the majority of sites that it has studied over time have shown little change in the methane levels. That suggests that a risk-based approach should be taken, rather than monitoring in every individual site proposed.

On the second amendment in this group, Amendment 95ZBN, the danger I see is the composition and amount of fracturing fluid cannot necessarily be told immediately at the beginning of the planning process. If this amendment was passed, if it was decided to change the chemical make-up of the fracturing fluid, the whole planning process would have to be gone through again —and, if it turned out that a greater quantity was needed than originally proposed, it would be necessary to go through the planning process again. Given that that process is in danger of taking many months or years to go through, a small geological change that increases the amount of fracking fluid that is required might delay the process right in the middle and make the situation more dangerous than it would otherwise have been. All this is being looked at by the Environment Agency and, with its rules, we should increase the confidence of people in the work that is being done on the regulation of fracking by that agency.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I want to underline one point under Amendment 95ZBN, which will be tedious because it was raised during the course of the passage of the Water Bill, on the role of water companies. I understand the exasperation of my noble friend Lord Young and the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, who referred in similar terms earlier to scares being raised about shale gas, and their not necessarily being very scientifically based. However, I do not think that Thames Water or Severn Trent Water fall into the category of scaremongering green organisations. They really ought to be brought into this process, because the biggest anxiety is about the effects on the water system and giving the water companies a statutory consultee role would help to reassure a number of people about the effect of fracking operations on the water supply. I therefore hope that proposed new subsection (3) in that amendment is adopted by the Government.