Great news on the fracking front. A company called IGas says it’s sitting on a huge shale gas reserve deep below Cheshire. Given the company’s ‘most likely’ estimate of 102 trillion cubic feet of gas, and a potential extraction rate of around 15 per cent, that could fulfil five years of UK gas demand, which runs at three trillion cubic feet per year — half of it currently imported. The other leading player in this field, Cuadrilla, has already claimed reserves of 200 trillion cubic feet in Lancashire, so all told (and subject to lots of caveats) that could be 15 years’ worth of fuel to keep us going until new nuclear stations get built and someone designs a wind turbine that works in the lightest of English breezes.
Even better news from IGas chief Andrew Austin is that his discovery lies ‘between the M62 and the M56’. He didn’t say so, but that’s just the sort of place to put a shale gas extraction plant or two; I mean no offence to readers in the industrial belt from Ellesmere Port to Warrington when I say Windsor Great Park it ain’t. So let’s get fracking — ‘get on and drill’, as Peter Lilley MP wrote here recently — while scientists keep working to perfect the alternative energy solutions that will one day free us from carbon dependency.
But that’s not how a cross-party band of rebel MPs sees it: they’ve been busy trying to derail the passage of the Energy Bill by amending it to include a ‘decarbonisation’ target that would effectively kill off gas-fired power generation by 2030, despite the obvious shortage of any other capacity to replace it. With this week’s other parliamentary news story in mind, we can only wonder which ‘fake lobbyist’ is behind this anarchic manoeuvre: could it be Beelzebub, filling backbenchers with misguided green zeal while dancing with glee at the prospect of chaos and darkness to come?
This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s column in this week’s Spectator. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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