Ross Clark Ross Clark

Thanks to the anti-fracking lobby, Britain can’t avoid Russian gas

Who stands between the government and a proper, effective sanctions regime against Russia? Not Jeremy Corbyn, though he might wish he could. Putin is going to get away with the Salisbury attack, suffering little more than a token expulsion of diplomats, thanks to anti-fracking protesters. They didn’t mean it, of course. When they stood before the bulldozers in the Sussex village Balcombe, jumped up and down about mini-Earth tremors in Lancashire they thought they were doing the Earth a favour. They saw UK-produced shale gas as a dirty alternative to clean, carbon-free energy. But they were wrong. In the short to medium term at least the alternative to UK-produced shale gas was imported gas, an increasing proportion of which comes from Russia.

Anyone surveying the wind turbines and solar panels sprouting across the British countryside could be forgiven for thinking that we are rapidly building self-sufficiency in energy – and clean energy at that. But it isn’t true. By far the bigger story is the decline in North Sea oil and gas production, which has taken up back to a level of energy-dependence last seen in the mid 1970s. As recently as 1999, the UK was producing 20 per cent more energy than it consumed. But the last year we enjoyed energy self-dependence was in 2003. By 2015, a net 38 per cent of energy consumed here was imported.

As for gas, which accounts for just under 40 per cent of total energy consumed in Britain, 43 per cent currently comes from UK production, 44 per cent comes from European pipelines (of which a third is ultimately supplied by Russia).

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