You, too, can be a shale profiteer

It might not be something you want to mention in the Half Moon Inn in Balcombe, or around any of the other communities where people are getting anxious about shale gas explorers ripping up the countryside with their drills and pipelines. But if shale is the tremendous source of wealth that David Cameron insists it can be for this country, how do you go about investing it? After all, if there are fortunes to be made, there is no reason not to claim your share.

There is no longer any question that shale gas is a major industry. In the US, where it is most advanced, it is already worth $76 billion annually, according to its trade association, and by the end of next year that will have grown to $118 billion. A huge amount of wealth has been generated as shale gas fields are opened up, and the infrastructure to support them is built — and energy prices have tumbled. True, we don’t have as much shale gas under the ground as the Americans do. We also don’t have an extensive network of pipelines, or a large stock of land drilling rigs, or wide-open spaces in which to operate them, as the Americans do. But it is still estimated that we have 1.3 trillion cubic feet of the stuff, and even if only 10 per cent of that could be got out of the ground it would be enough to meet the UK’s gas needs for half a century. In the process, someone is going to make a lot of money.

So how do you get your fingers into that honeypot? Not by owning land, unfortunately. Anyone with a few paddocks in the rolling wealds of Kent and East Sussex, or in the Bowland basin of Lancashire, might secretly be hoping that a fracking company will turn up on their doorstep one day waving a cheque for a few million for the rights to start drilling on their land.