Shale Gas

Debate between Roger Gale and John Pugh

Thursday 3rd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

My constituency is right on the edge of the latest find. I have to declare a sort of interest, because when I originally bought my house, under a 999-year lease, I found the local feudal landlords had mineral rights over my front garden. When I bought the freehold, I obviously took over those rights. My house suffers from tremors, but that is only because eight trains an hour from the Northern line go past my front door. None the less, there is a genuine concern in the area about the exploitation and extraction of shale gas. I will be visiting Cuadrilla tomorrow, coincidentally, to put to it some of the questions that will no doubt come up in this debate.

When I read the report, I was delighted by its excellence and balance. It may surprise you to hear this, Mr Gale, but I do not know much about geology and oil exploration. I was extraordinarily well educated by the report. What I understand, however, is politics, which I have been in for a long time. The two motives that move people in politics are greed and fear, and both greed and fear are in play in this particular issue.

On one side, pictures are sketched of a shale bonanza. The Lancashire find is put at 200 trillion cubic feet. I am reliably informed—well, informed—by a Cabinet Minister that that is almost equivalent to half the entire reserves in the USA. One ponders, I guess, why that has not dramatically affected the share value of Cuadrilla in the way that one might expect, but, none the less, it is by all acknowledgment an appreciable find. That offers the possibilities of making the UK energy-secure, of lowering energy prices and of generating wealth, although there could be an argument about how that wealth will be spread and who will benefit the most. There is no doubt that with energy comes wealth. The people buying up our premier league football teams, by and large, tend to be energy barons. That is one side of the equation.

On the other side, there is not the hype, but the fear. There is the fear of environmental destruction, the fear of wells being aborted over a period of time or rather more rapidly and there is the fear of poisoned water supplies. [Interruption.] I am sure that hon. Members have seen the flaming house taps in the USA, although I wonder what the American water authorities are doing in allowing gas to contaminate—

[Mr Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but someone’s mobile phone is switched on. Can everyone check their phone, including those sitting in the Public Gallery?

[John Pugh]

I suspect that it was my phone, unfortunately. I am interrupting myself.

There are also arguments about water depletion, tremors, geological instability and so on. Given the degree of hype on one side and of panic on the other, the report is most timely and helpful. I genuinely think it is a good report, which enables us to form a judgment about how and whether to extract. There is, however, one view that the report perhaps does not deal with sufficiently. It is at one extreme of the debate and it goes something like this: even if extraction is safe and profitable, it should not be done, either because it produces a carbon fuel, and we should not get more carbon fuels out of the ground, or because it augments and influences the use of carbon fuels and the carbon fuel market elsewhere. Organisations such as the Tyndall Centre have put that argument very seriously and would still oppose the extraction of shale gas in the UK for the same reasons, even if they found out tomorrow that it was perfectly safe.

People who argue like that believe a range of different things. They might believe that renewables can plug the UK energy gap quickly, that the British public will dramatically and quickly reduce their energy consumption through energy conservation or energy efficiency or that nuclear energy can easily plug the gap and step up to the plate. When we go through those alternative assumptions and the general argument for doing nothing about shale gas, however, it becomes clear that none of them has general support from informed opinion, and I share none of them myself. I do not think renewables will plug the energy gap as quickly as we would like, that the British public will dramatically or rapidly alter their behaviour in the next decade or that nuclear energy can easily fill the gap.

Given that most people believe and accept that gas is part of the mix, the debate can then centre on whether we should have UK gas or imported gas. People can be against natural gas extraction full stop or shale gas extraction full stop, or they can simply be against shale gas extraction in the UK. As I understand it, most people’s anxieties are not about shale gas per se, but about particular propositions in the UK and about whether the process followed here might emulate bad practice elsewhere in the world. Most people are concerned about safety, either because they are not convinced that shale gas extraction is safe or because they are not convinced that all companies can be trusted to make it safe—even where it has the potential to be safe, they think one should be suspicious of oil companies.