Fracking is confirmed a non starter8 Mar 2022 00:47
Looking at new North Sea gas supplies may not be palatable but is pragmatic
Nils Pratley. If the UK is going to need gas well into the 2030s, it would surely be better to get it close to home. The broad energy direction has been set towards nuclear and renewables, but there’s no getting away from the fact that gas will be in the mix for a long time yet. Virtually all transition scenarios imagine it, and you have to be an extreme optimist to believe UK consumers can quickly be converted to the joys of heat pumps. Thus, from one quarter, comes a call for a fracking revolution under Lancashire. Readers of the Mail on Sunday at the weekend were treated to a blast in the form of Nigel Farage’s refrain about how “net zero is net stupid” and that the answer to our energy woes is homegrown shale gas. Prepare to hear more in similar style. As UK wholesale gas prices reach unheard-of levels, a well-resourced fracking lobby has reassembled(FOTH). It is therefore reassuring to know that the secretary of state for business and energy is having NONE OF IT. Kwasi Kwarteng wrote a sensible piece in the same paper that backed more homegrown nuclear and more renewables and pointed out the drawbacks with fracking. The gas would take a DECADE to arrive in volume even if the moratorium were lifted TOMORROW Local planning conditions in densely populated areas are severe; what works in Texas won’t do in Lancashire. One can add that the economics of UK shale are currently guesswork: having 50 years of theoretical reserves doesn’t mean it can all be recovered at commercially viable prices. But here’s the rub. “We also need to back North Sea oil and gas while we transition to cheap, clean power,” said Kwarteng. On that score he is surely also correct. There is “a certain hypocrisy”, as the independent energy analyst Peter Atherton puts it, on the part of the opponents of North Sea development “in being anti-UK production when they know that all their own scenarios see the need for substantial amounts of gas into the 2030s.” Quite: if the gas is going to arrive anyway, best to get it close to home where environmental standards can be controlled. It’s not a universally popular view, but it would be legitimate for Kwarteng to ask North Sea firms for projections of how much they could increase gas output over the next one, five and 10 years while we wait for extra renewables and nuclear capacity to arrive. Then it would be a matter of incentivising production (whether by contracts-for-difference or whatever) from a source that, unlike shale, offers certainty.
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