Shale Gas Production

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I am slightly nervous now if the noble Baroness is welcoming a Statement which we have made. We might have made a mistake in our energy policy—sorry, I am being facetious.

The difficulty with the Green Party’s position is that they say that everything should be done with renewables, but that does not give us solutions to the problems in the near term. This is a gradual transition. We already have some of the largest quantities of offshore wind and renewables in the world. I accept that the position of the noble Baroness is that we should go even further and faster, but we are progressing as fast as we possibly can. We have huge investments going into renewables. However, we need fossil fuels in the short term—unless the Greens are also proposing that we should stop driving our petrol and diesel fuel vehicles and disconnect our gas boilers. This is a gradual transition; there is a need for fossil fuels during the transition, and the independent Committee on Climate Change has accepted that. Even the noble Baroness might think that it was probably more sensible to gain those fuels during the transition from our own domestic production, rather than from Putin.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I also welcome the Minister’s Statement. It is good to hear what the Minister said in general. Historically, I have not been that opposed to fracking done under absolutely the right conditions. However, he is absolutely right that the development period would now be far too long. History has moved on, and gas has to be cut down rather than supplied locally. For renewables developments such as offshore wind, which the Minister mentioned, the gestation period for those sort of investments is still something like 10 to 12 years from when the Crown Estates goes out and makes an offer. Does the Minister have any views about how that period can be cut down, without in any way compromising on the environmental investigation aspect? It seems to me that we should be able to do that sort of stuff quicker.

[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.