The Oil and Gas Authority has ordered that the only shale gas wells in the UK to be plugged with concrete. The wells that were opened by the controversial process if “fracking” were the site of test drilling which had been hit by repeated delays due to protests at the Preston New Road site.
Fracking had be stopped at the site since November 2020 when the government withdrew support of the practice which may lead to earthquakes and in response to an Oil and Gas Authority report which stated that it was not possible to predict the size of tremors caused by fracking. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party have all called for a fracking ban.
Facing the end of potentially lucrative fracking business in the UK, the firm that runs these wells, Cuadrilla chief Francis Egan said that the UK was ‘spending billions of pounds annually importing gas’ and ‘emissions from importing gas are far higher than those from home-produced shale gas’.
Steve Baker, Conservative MP for Wycombe agreed saying: ‘We’re abandoning any chance we had of levelling up, solving the cost-of-living crisis and delivering on… net zero.’
A Downing Street spokesman said shale gas was ‘not a short-term fix and it’s still unproven as a resource in the UK’, explaining: ‘It would take years…before commercial quantities of shale gas could be produced.’
For more discussion of environmental policy and our changing climate see our event below which will be broadcast via live Webinar.
