Is the EU stopping Britain’s shale revolution?

A few months after the last election, Oliver Letwin warned Cabinet colleagues that a chunk of Britain’s income would be gone for good after the economic crisis. Letwin, who has always been the Cameron project’s in-house intellectual, told them that some of the complex high finance in which Britain had specialised was never coming back. We would have to develop a new form of economic activity to make up for the loss.

The good news is that this new form is looming into view. Fracking the Bowland Shale alone will, on a relatively cautious estimate, produce the equivalent of 90 years of North Sea gas production.

We will have to wait for the British Geological Survey’s report on the Weald Basin to know how much shale there is in the south to add to the supplies in the Bowland, which runs from Nottingham and Scarborough in the east to Wrexham and Blackpool in the west. But ministers are increasingly optimistic. Shale gas promises to be as significant to Britain’s prosperity as North Sea oil.

Inside the government, the view is that Britain is ten years behind the United States in shale exploration. But we might gain even more from it than the US: we rely more on imported oil and gas, and therefore suffer more from their volatile prices.

The coalition was slow to grasp the importance of shale. The Liberal Democrat control of the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the vestiges of Cameroon greenery meant that little progress was made in its first few years in power; there was even a moratorium on fracking for a year as the government assessed whether it caused too much seismic activity. But George Osborne, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson and Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon have stopped the government from dragging its feet.