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Behind The Fracking Divide In The UK
30 April 2012
Local communities in the U.K. may still be against hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, but the government has once again proven that its interests are more closely aligned with investment bankers in the City of London than those forced to live with the consequences.
Local Communities Are Against Fracking, But Do The Government Actually Care?
The process of hydraulic fracturing is a mining technique, which uses injected fluid to propagate fractures in a rock layer to release hydrocarbon deposits that would otherwise be un-commercial. Developed in the U.S. and first used in 1947 for stimulating of oil and natural gas wells, the use of "fracking" soared in the past decade as thousands of wells have been drilled into the Marcellus Formation, also referred to as the Marcellus Shale, a deposit of marine sedimentary rock found in eastern North America.
While initial environmental protests of the technique centred around its possibility of polluting underground water aquifers as a number of known carcinogenic substances are used in the procedure, more recently research has focused on an even more ominous by-product of the technique – the increased possibility of earthquakes.
While the U.S. Geological Survey and the state governments have investigating the link in the States; in Britain, the Department of Energy and Climate Change on 17 April published an independent expert report recommending measures to mitigate the risks of seismic tremors from hydraulic fracturing and invited public comment on its recommendations.
The report reviewed a series of studies commissioned by Cuadrilla, whose fracking operations in Lancashire aroused public debate, and the document "confirms that minor earthquakes detected in the area of the company's Preese Hall operations near Blackpool in April and May last year were caused by fracking."
DECC's Chief Scientific Advisor David MacKay remarked:
"If shale gas is to be part of the UK's energy mix we need to have a good understanding of its potential environmental impacts and what can be done to mitigate those impacts.
“This comprehensive independent review of Cuadrilla's evidence suggests a set of robust measures to make sure future seismic risks are minimized - not just at this location but at any other potential sites across the UK."
The report is certain to reopen debate about the Lancashire tremors, which on 1 April and 27 May 2011 shook the Blackpool area, registering 2.3 and 1.5 on the Richter Scale. On 2 November a report commissioned by Cuadrilla Resources, "The Geo-mechanical Study of Bowland Shale Seismicity," acknowledged that hydraulic fracturing was responsible for the two tremors and possibly as many as fifty separate earth tremors overall, noting that it was "highly probable" that the hydraulic fracturing of its Preese Hall-1 well did trigger a number of "minor" seismic events.