Shale Gas

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, who speaks a great deal of common sense on these issues. I declare my interests in energy as listed in the register—they are mainly in coal, which is threatened by shale gas, and so I should be against it but I am not.

I first visited a shale gas well in Pennsylvania in 2011 while writing a report for a think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded by my noble friend Lord Lawson. At that time, most energy analysts were still arguing that shale gas was a flash in the pan. I concluded that that was almost certainly wrong and that we were witnessing an energy revolution of huge significance. And so it proved. America went from importing to exporting gas. The shale boom pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy through domestic production and lower prices. The environmental problems were minimal. President Obama’s Energy Secretary confirmed this in 2015, when he said:

“I still have not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater”.


Over the past decade, America has cut its carbon dioxide emissions faster than any country, thanks almost entirely to the shale gas revolution. It did so while simultaneously bringing heavy industry back onshore, whereas we have driven it away. Saudi Arabia tried to kill the shale drilling business in 2014 by flooding the market and cutting prices. It failed—the technology keeps improving and, as my noble friend Lord MacGregor said, the break-even price gets lower and lower.

Last November, I was on a shale-oil site in Colorado watching the new quiet-fracking fleet do its work: an operation that takes about the same length of time as building a wind turbine and is as limited in area, but produces hundreds of times more energy and is about 2% as prominent in height in the landscape when it is finished.

In 2011, I wrote that,

“shale gas faces a formidable host of enemies in the coal, nuclear, renewable and environmental industries—all keen, it seems, to strangle it at birth, especially in Europe”.

I was right about that too. What was the reaction of the environmental movement to this gift from the gods? To oppose it with all its might, even at the cost of telling the truth. This year, Friends of the Earth was forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw several misleading claims it had made about shale gas. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, it even resorted to arguing that sand is carcinogenic. It did not quite have the brass neck to complain about dihydrogen monoxide, which is injected in large quantities into shale gas wells—for those whose chemistry is rusty, that is H₂O, or water.

Who is behind this anti-shale propaganda? Let us look at who stands to suffer from a successful shale revolution here. First, the subsidy-drunk renewable energy industry, still trying to justify things like burning American forests for electricity. The former DECC chief scientist, the late Professor David MacKay, found that in particular circumstances, using wood pellets to generate electricity could have a carbon footprint almost twice that of coal and four times that of gas, and yet we subsidise foreign wood pellets and stand in the way of shale gas.

The second group with an interest in undermining British shale gas, apparently, is a foreign power. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary-General, has accused Moscow of campaigning to undermine shale gas. Here is a quote from National Review magazine in 2015:

“Russia has ramped up covert payments to environmental groups in the West. By supporting well-intentioned environmentalists with hard cash (often without their knowledge), Russian intelligence gains Western mouthpieces to petition Western audiences in its favor.”


Sure enough, the Kremlin’s mouthpiece, RT, Russia Today, has been broadcasting anti-UK shale propaganda on its “Keiser Report”, including the line that,

“frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”.

The US Director of National Intelligence said very recently:

“RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability”.


This is what we are up against. The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, knows Russia well. Given what I have said, can he shed any light on which anti-fracking protesters in this country are funded directly or indirectly by Russian interests?

We will be burning gas for decades to come under any policy. Even the national grid’s extreme “gone green” scenario for future energy policy sees us burning almost as much gas in 2035 as we burn today. But more than that, we have a huge chemical industry in this country, employing hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly. It needs methane and ethane, derived from natural gas wells, as feedstock. That industry will disappear rapidly if we do not exploit domestic shale. It has repeatedly warned us of this. As the GMB union puts it, if exploratory drilling reveals a plentiful supply of UK shale gas reserves,

“is it not a moral duty for Britain to take responsibility for providing for our own gas needs from those supplies rather than importing gas from elsewhere”?

Beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the Bowland shale, lies one of the richest shale gas resources ever discovered. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, just 10% of it would be enough to provide 50 years of British needs. We know how to get it out, using sand and water to make millimetre-wide cracks a mile and a half down, with minimal environmental risks. The tiny group of middle-class southerners who go north to protest about this stuff are not representative of public opinion. Let us not us give in to the 21st-century Luddites, commercial interests or foreign crony-capitalists who do not have our interests at heart.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I find myself in opposition to the vast majority of your Lordships who have spoken. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, on securing this debate, which I regard as very important. I do not agree, or believe, that fracking will deliver energy security in the long term. I do not believe that fracking is sustainable or will help us meet our legally binding targets. I believe that it will introduce a new form of greenhouse gas. It is not sensible or logical, when we have just signed up to the Paris agreement on climate change, to encourage forward a source of energy that emits greenhouse gases.

There is a litany of reasons why fracking is a bad idea. I can see that the Government look across the sea—the Atlantic—with green eyes. Could shale gas do for the UK what it has done for the US? Many noble Lords believe that it could, but I do not—so no would be my answer. We have different geology and geography. To some degree, the Government are keen because private money will come in and produce the gas. As many of your Lordships have said, this gas will be an interim supply of energy—a bridging loan to the future. It will get the Government out of a hole that exposes a lack of a planned energy policy, and take us from where we are now to a sustainable future. We have had no sight of the emissions reduction plan and no word on government plans to decarbonise heating. As for the experts, I am not sure that this Government believe in experts.

I hear what your Lordships have said about the scare stories but I believe some of the doctors and health charities that have raised concerns about water contamination and threats to health. The contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Mair, was very impressive and substantial but Scotland and Wales have banned it. I do not think that they banned it for no reason. Moreover, this is not America. In America, landowners’ rights mean that they get the profits from selling their land for fracking. We do not have wide-open unpopulated areas and the ravages caused by fracking, with literally thousands of wells, will lay the land to waste—and this is inhabited land, not like in America.

[Viscount Ridley]

Is the noble Baroness aware that the current revolution in shale gas started in the suburbs of Fort Worth, which is an inhabited city, and has reached its apogee in some very heavily populated areas of Pennsylvania?

[Baroness Featherstone]

As my noble friend Lord Stoneham reminds me, their environmental standards are somewhat lower than ours. I am not saying that everywhere in America is unpopulated, but it is a very different territory from most of the United Kingdom.

There will be people—such as people in Ryedale, for example—who object strongly to what is projected for their local environment. They will use the planning process to object in the way that they are entitled to do. Promises were made that national areas of exceptional beauty would be protected and that local people would hold sway, but that has gone and the promises have been broken.

Putting all that to one side, the most damaging effect of developing the shale industry is one that to an extent was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Smith. It will set back our ability to reach our legally binding targets by 40 years and undermine the development to scale of renewable heat technology. Renewable heat is vital. Industry will develop the technologies we need for renewable heat if we have the right policy framework and incentives. There would have to be incentives that carry a cast-iron guarantee from the Government that they will not be taken away in a precipitate manner, as happened with the Government undermining investor confidence by the precipitate removal of agreed subsidies on wind and solar. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, raised the breaking of the manifesto pledge on carbon capture and storage.

The Government’s reputation will no longer be adequate to reassure investors; they will need an agreement that is literally written in blood. Additionally, as several noble Lords have said, all we have in the UK so far is licences for exploratory drilling. We are years if not decades away from producing shale gas at any scale, if it happens at all. The Environmental Audit Committee concluded that shale will not contribute to replacing coal because, by the time it comes on stream, coal will no longer be used. I do not believe that fracking is the answer. I do not put my trust in this Government. Everything we have seen since the end of the coalition—when the Liberal Democrats held sway in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is also no longer—is pretty indicative of the importance that the Conservative Government attach to climate change. Everything indicates that this Government do not favour a green approach, green understanding or the imperative, for both the planet and the economy, of taking our future energy supply seriously and not introducing something that is a stop-gap and not sustainable. If we had a Government who encouraged cutting-edge technology—renewables, energy efficiency, home energy improvements—