Energy: Fracking

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Borwick]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the report by the Centre for Policy Studies, Why Every Serious Environmentalist Should Favour Fracking.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests, recorded in the register, in a land company and as a trustee of the British Lung Foundation.

I have, at my own cost, visited Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is widely known as the heart of “Frackistan”—a place where shale gas extraction is growing apace. What I saw in Williamsport is a new city built to service a new industry, and beautiful countryside that was still beautiful. Behind the trees might be the top of a drilling rig, but when we went to the production site, there were only a couple of acres of stones. Only underneath them could you see the plastic membrane put down to protect the environment from minute spills that rarely happen. Such rainwater as falls on those membranes is prevented from seeping into the ground. Instead, it is gathered and used in the production process. At the natural gas well we saw, there was nothing much higher than five metres. It comprised a Christmas tree, a compressor and a meter hut for measuring the wealth produced in that site and put into the major gas pipelines that eventually flow into homes and factories. I am grateful to Anadarko for letting me see its site, its safety processes and the enormous efforts it pursues to prevent pollution. Those guys are working hard and succeeding to make sure no harm occurs.

When you think about fracking—pumping water, sand and chemicals into shale formations far below the Earth’s surface—perhaps you might think that it would involve a great deal more machinery, equipment and land space. However, it reminded me somewhat of Winter Wonderland, an amusement park that stands in Hyde Park for a couple of months around Christmas. It is put up in one of the most protected and lovely green spaces in the whole country, but the point is that Winter Wonderland is temporary and goes away pretty soon. There is noise, there are lights and there is extra traffic, but they go away and you would not even know the site was there. The same happens with a shale site. Once the initial flurry is over, the actual production phase is pretty benign. The intrusion stops but the wealth carries on.

The air quality in Shanghai today is rated at 155. That means it is classified as “unhealthy” and:

“Everyone may begin to experience health effects”.

In Beijing, air quality has recently reached levels of 551—extremely dangerous. This matters in the environmental debate on shale, because that bad air is largely caused by coal. Extracting shale gas seems to be the perfect way to mitigate global emissions while stimulating global economic growth. As the paper by the Centre for Policy Studies suggests, shale gas technology should be advanced as rapidly as possible and shared widely, to cut emissions and improve air quality.

I have known Professor Muller, one the authors of the CPS paper, for some years. He is a scientist, not a politician. Professor Muller is a physicist of world standing, receiving distinguished teaching awards from Berkeley. He assesses facts and then comes to a conclusion. He does not try to make his work embrace preconceived ideas. Professor Muller co-founded the Berkeley Earth organisation at the University of California in 2010, to examine historical temperature records. He returned to the base data, to check them without the hot air of politics. After much work, he concluded that climate change exists and that the levels of change are quite small. He also concluded that the change was correlated enough with the rise in carbon dioxide to say that it is manmade.

After extensive work, Professor Muller has shown in this CPS paper that shale gas extraction will actually reduce emissions. After all, global warming is a global problem: a tonne of Chinese CO₂ is as bad as a tonne of British CO₂. It is global warming, not British warming. Crucially, extracting shale gas instead of burning coal will also reduce the amount of harmful particulate matter 2.5 in the air. PM2.5s are tiny dust particles that penetrate deep into human lungs. The presence in the air of PM2.5 causes people to die: 75,000 a year in the US and 400,000 a year in Europe. Its levels still go unregulated in the developing world and it currently kills more people annually than either AIDS, malaria, diabetes or tuberculosis. Shale gas offers an opportunity to cut massively PM2.5’s presence in the air. If extraction expertise were shared, we also could see a big drop off in CO₂ emissions in the developing world.

There are many environmental concerns about shale but Professor Muller takes each one in turn and dispels them all. The first is that shale gas production depletes limited supplies of fresh water. However, shale extraction sites have lots of salty water reserves underneath, too. It is becoming standard, and cheaper, for brine to replace fresh water at all sites. Already in the US about half of the water used is brine.

The now famous short film “Gasland” highlighted another potential environmental issue—the “flaming faucets”. In the film the director, Josh Fox, is shown in the home of a landowner near a shale site igniting gas from a tap with a cigarette lighter. He later admitted that the taps were leaking long before shale extraction started.

Noted scientist Yoko Ono also chipped in with a series of adverts warning that,

“fracking makes all water dirty”.

The best way to combat pollution is to apply tight regulations and big penalties if any companies were to contaminate the Earth—much the same as happens now with companies supplying oil or natural gas.

Perhaps the most notorious environmental concern in the UK debate is that of fracking-induced earthquakes. The argument goes that if we start drilling under Blackpool, the whole of Lancashire will be rocking. However, let us not forget that earthquakes are recorded almost every day in the UK, and a brief glance at the list of the most recent events tells us that most of them occur at New Ollerton in north Nottinghamshire. It is a big coal-mining area. There was one there on Friday evening at 9.30 pm with a magnitude of 1.5, and across the UK there have been 38 in the past 30 days. The point is that energy extraction causes very minor tremors. In any case, the Government are ensuring safeguards that immediately stop extraction if tremors of 0.5 or more on the Richter scale are recorded. It may be that that level is too low because that is barely more than the shock felt from 10 Lords a-leaping.

Professor Muller has provided a robust environmental case for proceeding with shale extraction. However, he is not the only one. In 2012, the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering found that the health, safety and environmental risks of shale extraction can be managed effectively in the UK. We have a track record for extracting a lucrative natural resource with little environmental impact. For instance, people said that we would cause lots of environmental damage when drilling for oil in the North Sea but, with the right research and regulation, we managed it.

Rightly, the Government have promoted the power of localism. People should have the right to have a say on the factors that affect them locally. With drilling for shale, the community will certainly have a say. Those who are afraid should be reminded that the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency can both put a stop to drilling, even if the council gives the all-clear. Throughout the planning industry, though, localism is limited by a duty to co-operate—one area’s localism must not ruin another area’s locality.

With shale, there will be a duty to co-operate within government—that is, among departments. The Treasury, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions should all work with the Department of Energy and Climate Change to get it done; they are all affected in some way. Energy security has an impact on the Foreign Office and defence. Europe imports about 30% of its natural gas from Russia, which has frightening implications. As Fraser Nelson remarked in the Telegraph:

“Of all the weapons in America’s arsenal, its new energy power is perhaps what the Kremlin fears most”.

Let us also remember that America’s shale revolution, which produces oil as well as gas, has allowed it to disengage from the Middle East.

The economic benefits could be extraordinary, which should interest the Treasury. There should be a surge in tax revenues and reduced costs in imports. As a deficit-cutting measure, it should be right at the top of the top of the list. For the DWP, shale gas extraction could create around 74,000 jobs, with geologists in Lancashire and mechanics in Sussex. Councils could see a surge in business rate revenue, too.

Shale gas is the sort of subject that this House excels at because it affects so many different government departments. The Select Committee report on ageing was another example of this. Our economics committee has been considering this subject, and I very much look forward to hearing its views. Perhaps there should be a Lords Select Committee study into the cross-departmental benefits of shale gas extraction, to ensure that this industry gets going as soon as possible.