Shale Gas

Lord Mair Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mair (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this important debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Truscott. Shale gas and its extraction by the process of hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking”, remains a controversial subject. In discussing the environmental benefits of shale gas, it is also important to address potential environmental risks from a science and engineering standpoint. These risks have been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Truscott.

I speak from my experience as chairman of the committee that produced in 2012 the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering report, Shale Gas Extraction in the UK: A Review of Hydraulic Fracturing. That independent review was requested by the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, at that time Sir John Beddington. It arose from experiences of seismicity in the Blackpool area in 2011 shortly after the fracking of an exploratory shale gas well at the Preese Hall site. Our remit was to review the available scientific and engineering evidence associated with fracking, identify the major risks and consider whether these could be managed effectively in the UK. We were asked to address two major questions. One, what are the environmental risks, particularly in relation to possible groundwater contamination? Two, what are the risks of earthquakes? In our review we consulted with and received evidence from around 70 experts and organisations, including environmental organisations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF.

Our report concluded the following. First, the fracking process itself is unlikely to contaminate groundwater. To reach overlying freshwater aquifers, the fractures in the shale would have to propagate upwards towards the surface for many hundreds of metres to reach them. The risk of this happening is very low, provided that fracking takes place at great depths—it is typically undertaken at depths of several kilometres. It is important not to conflate the fracking process with shale gas well operations. Groundwater contamination is much less likely to be due to the fracking process than to faulty well construction. The only realistic way that any contamination of groundwater may occur is if operations are poorly regulated and faulty wells are constructed as a result. Ensuring well integrity must remain the highest priority to prevent contamination. If wells are properly constructed, sealed and managed, the risk of contamination is very low. Our report therefore concluded that shale gas extraction can be undertaken safely in the UK, provided that operational best practices are implemented and enforced through robust regulation.

Secondly, our report concluded that earth tremors resulting from fracking are minimal, smaller than those caused by coal mining. In this context, “earth tremor” is a much more appropriate term than “earthquake”. The effects felt from earth tremors caused by fracking would be no worse than those from a passing heavy lorry. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, referred to earthquakes in Oklahoma. More significant earthquakes have been reported in the USA, all arising from reinjection of waste water into disposal wells, not from fracking itself.

We recommended various regulatory safeguards to manage these risks. Vital to effective management of the risks is comprehensive and rigorous monitoring. In particular, methane and other contaminants in groundwater should be closely monitored, as well as potential leakages of methane and other gases into the atmosphere. Similar conclusions on the importance of rigorous monitoring were reached by Public Health England in its 2014 report and in other recent reports by science and engineering academies within Europe and elsewhere, including the Australian and Canadian academies. Our Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering review made 10 major recommendations, all of which the Government accepted. The Task Force on Shale Gas, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Finsbury, reached similar conclusions and made similar recommendations in its final report, published in 2015.

We should nevertheless be careful to distinguish between exploratory activities and full-scale production. Shale gas extraction in the UK is presently at a very small scale, involving only exploratory drilling. There is greater uncertainty about the scale of production activities should a future shale gas industry develop nationwide. We will need to pay attention to the way in which risks scale up. Regulatory capacity will need to be increased. Efficient co-ordination of the numerous government bodies with regulatory responsibilities for shale gas extraction must be maintained.

Our report covered environmental and health and safety risks, but climate risks were not addressed in detail. Fugitive methane emissions during shale gas extraction operations must also be closely monitored and minimised. Green completion technologies, designed to capture any methane and other gases emitted from flowback water, have been made mandatory in the USA by the Environmental Protection Agency since 2015. This may not be applicable to our current small-scale exploratory activities, but such technologies will certainly be needed for any future production activities in the UK.

The potential economic and environmental benefits of shale gas development in the UK can only be properly evaluated by undertaking exploratory drilling and fracking. The type and composition of gas extracted and the proved reserves will vary depending on the detailed geology, so each site has to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. “Proved reserves” means the volume that is economically recoverable. It is this that will really determine the potential economic benefits, which will only become clear when appropriate exploratory drilling has been completed. That is why it is so important for exploratory drilling to proceed without delay.

Scare stories, myths and mistruths about fracking abound: flames coming from water taps and damaging earthquakes, to name two. Effective public engagement is essential to dispel such myths and mistruths, thereby enabling shale gas extraction to gain wider acceptability. We should recall that the UK has been employing fracking and directional drilling for non-shale resources for many years. Fracking itself is not new to the UK but it is being newly applied to shale gas. The quantities of water needed are greater but otherwise the process is very similar. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, pointed out, over the last 30 years more than 2,000 onshore wells have been drilled in the UK, around 200 of which have been fracked to enhance the recovery of oil or gas. In our Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering review we were not aware of groundwater contamination issues with any of those wells.

In summary, moratoria on shale gas extraction get us nowhere. The constructive way forward is to proceed cautiously with well-controlled exploratory drilling, with a strong regulatory framework, robust environmental risk assessments and rigorous monitoring regimes. As the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, put it, we need to get on with it. Only this will provide the evidence needed to properly assess the economic and environmental benefits of shale gas development in the UK.

[Lord Vinson (Con)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, will he say clearly that his society would strongly recommend the development of shale gas because of the huge economic benefits it could bring to this country, subject only to satisfactory safeguards in its production?

[Lord Mair]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. The answer is, yes, the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering would indeed say that we should proceed, provided that we do so exactly as I have said, with very careful and rigorous monitoring.