Shale Gas Production

Lord Bishop of Durham Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point; I think he has put his finger on the nub of the problem. Whenever there is a crisis in politics—and there is definitely a crisis at the moment—there is always a search for quick and easy solutions. Unfortunately, on energy infrastructure, there are no quick and easy solutions: these things take years, if not decades, to put into operation. We are progressing nuclear power, as indeed we should, but nothing is going to happen for a number of years—possibly not until the start of the next decade. We already have in motion the expansion that I mentioned earlier of offshore wind. We have the targets in place for 2030 and those developments are already proceeding.

The same problem occurs with the search for new licensing fields in the North Sea, if we push ahead with it: it will be a number of years before new fields can be developed. Even if we did progress shale, it would be a number of years—possibly a decade—before we would get meaningful quantities of gas out of the ground, even if we overcame all the environmental objections. I am afraid that there are no easy silver bullets to this problem. It is probably a silver buckshot: there are lots of different smaller-scale solutions that we will need to develop over a number of years.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

Will the Minister expand on the investment of microgeneration at local level? At Bishop Auckland, one of the local estates is having a massive transformation through solar being installed on all the rooms on that estate. Could not more money be put into that? Let us forget fracking, to be honest, because it is not going to deliver us anything at any time.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Yes, is the short answer to the right reverend Prelate’s question. We are supporting microgeneration with feed-in tariffs et cetera, but we need to be cognisant of the scale of the problem. Microgeneration—solar panels, small wind turbines, small-scale running-water power, et cetera—will make a contribution, but it is unlikely to solve the problem in the meantime. We are talking about a few megawatts as opposed to the gigawatts we need in total. It would, however, make a contribution, and it is already making a contribution. Government policy is to support small-scale microgeneration, but it is unlikely to be a long-term solution to our problem.