UK Shale Gas

Debate between Graham Stringer and Baroness Keeley

Thursday 18th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Barbara Keeley]

Will my hon. Friend wait until I complete this point? I will come to him in a moment. His constituency is at the other end of Salford from mine, and I know that he will disagree with what I say.

As we heard extensively from the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, there is talk of a community bonus of £100,000 per well. The difficulty is that it is out of scale with the potential loss in house values that people will see. The 1% of any revenue will also come along far too late. If someone’s house has lost value and they have become fed up and moved away, they will not be helped by 1% of revenue.

[Graham Stringer]

Outside London and the south-east, the highest house prices in the country are in Aberdeen, due to the benefit of the oil industry in the North sea. Eventually, the improvements in the economy if shale gas is exploited are likely to lead to a rebalancing of the UK economy and higher house prices.

[Barbara Keeley]

My hon. Friend is entitled to that view, but I do not agree with him.

There are serious concerns about the impact of fracking on communities. I want to quote from the International Energy Agency’s “Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas: World Energy Outlook Special Report on Unconventional Gas”:

“Producing unconventional gas is an intensive industrial process, generally imposing a larger environmental footprint than conventional gas development. More wells are often needed…The scale of development can have major implications for local communities, land use and water resources. Serious hazards, including the potential for air pollution and for contamination of surface and groundwater, must be successfully addressed.”

Those are the issues and concerns that are starting to bear down on my constituents, and the notion that anyone living in an area where such things were being contemplated would see house price increases is just not realistic.

I want also to quote from a report by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research produced by local academics at the university of Manchester:

“The depth of shale gas extraction gives rise to major challenges in identifying categorically pathways of contamination of groundwater by chemicals used in the extraction process. An analysis of these substances suggests that many have toxic, carcinogenic or other hazardous properties. There is considerable anecdotal evidence from the US that contamination of both ground and surface water has occurred in a range of cases.”

The report also states that

“there are a number of documented examples of pollution events owing to poor construction and operator error. There are reports of incidents involving contamination of ground and surface waters with contaminants such as brine, unidentified chemicals, natural gas, sulphates, and hydrocarbons”.

Government Members appear to be saying “Nonsense.” I think I heard the Minister say it too, so I hope he can give me information that I can pass on to my constituents that will help to settle their minds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I had not noticed that the air conditioning had changed.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), whom I tend to either agree or disagree with 100%. Today I am afraid it is the second of those two positions.

There have been many excellent speeches on both sides, and I will try not to say what I was going to say, because that would mean repeating some of the points that have been made; instead, let me deal with some of the facts and issues that have come up.

One of the last points to be made was about water. While relatively little water is used, it has not been pointed out that there is, in most cases, a mile of rock between where the fracking takes place and the water table, so contamination is very unlikely.

On house prices, I was responsible, as chair of Manchester airport, for building the second runway there. At the bottom of it is a beautiful Cheshire village called Style. When the runway was being built, people claimed that house prices there would go down, but the only time prices were affected was during the campaign against the runway, when there were lots of signs up in the village. As soon as the campaign went away, house prices went up, even though the runway was taking very large planes. The fact is that house prices are related to economic activity, so my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) can reassure her constituents that house prices will not be brought down.

[Barbara Keeley]

It is important to tell my hon. Friend that I already have evidence that, because of these developments, people are planning to move out of the area, which I would not want to happen, while others have said they will not move into the area. This really is having an impact.

[Graham Stringer]

That is completely consistent with what I was saying—that the fear of the activity, rather than the activity itself, is the problem.

I want now to move on to the science and to speak as a scientist. I agree with virtually everything the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) said, apart from when he completely accepted what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. We must remember that it involves a political process, which lies on top of a number of scientific papers; its work is not necessarily put together by scientists themselves.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion could be accused of being unrealistically precise in her comments about what is likely to happen in the climate over the coming years, and I would make two simple points about the science. First, I have talked to most of the leading scientists on climate change in this country and in the United States, and there is no known way of distinguishing natural variations in the climate from impacts caused by carbon dioxide—nobody knows how to do that.

Secondly, the models that have been used to predict the increase in temperatures have all been wrong. In the Met Office, we have the biggest supercomputers in the world, which are great at back-projecting climate, but their projections of climate into the future have all been inaccurate. That is just an indication that there is something unknown about the science, which is not to say that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, because it clearly is, and it has been known as such for a long time. However, an artificial precision is being introduced into the debate, and it really should not be there. We do not, therefore, often talk about the science.

My next point is about the costs of all the different policies and the price that will result. An interesting report by Liberum Capital indicates the difference between the cost of the Government’s policies on replacing the sources of our energy and the cost of replacing like with like. It finds that there is a difference of more than £200 billion between the two, and that will come out somewhere in the price of gas to our constituents.

The Government’s energy policy is based on taking a long-term position on the price of gas and oil—fossil fuels. Essentially, they are betting the house, the country or hundreds of billions of pounds that the price of fossil fuel will continue to rise. If that happens, and if renewables are put in place, they are likely to win their bet—and it is a bet. They will have to find the capital to fund those renewable energy supplies, but given that prices of publicly quoted shares in the European renewables market have dropped below their level in 2004-05, that looks very unlikely. If the Government lose their bet, our constituents will pay more for their energy than they should.