UK shale gas survey likely to reveal reserves higher than expected
New estimates of the UK’s reserves of shale gas will be published on Thursday, and are expected to be much larger than originally thought – potentially supplying the UK with decades’ worth of natural gas, if a high proportion of the gas in the rocks can be extracted at a low cost. However that key question that cannot yet be answered due to the lack of experimental wells drilled so far and the challenges posed by the UK’s high density of population.
The survey of shale reserves, carried out by the British Geological Survey at the request of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, estimated that 1,300 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas is in the Bowland shale in northern England alone. The UK uses 3tcf in gas annually. However, the BGS did not say what amount would be recoverable – it has previously said just 5tcf would be recoverable.
New shale gas drilling is likely to come under fire from protestors, though ministers are hoping to put off opposition by offering local communities incentives to encourage them to agree to the fracking operations. The incentives which may take the form of energy bill discounts or improvements to local amenities.
Supporters of shale gas say that it could provide the UK with a new indigenous source of energy, at a time when imports of energy from overseas are at an all-time high. But detractors argue that fracking – blasting apart dense shale rocks hundreds of metres underground, at very high pressure, to release tiny bubbles of methane trapped within them – can cause small earth tremors, may lead to leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, and uses vast quantities of fresh water.
A key safety consideration is that in Lancashire at one of the three sites where exploratory drilling has so far taken place in the UK, earth tremors were enough to deform the casing of the fracking well. That deformation did not cause gas to leak, but if further earthquakes cause similar deformation in new wells it could cause problems in future. Cuadrilla, the only company yet embarking on fracking in the UK, came under fire forfailing to tell government regulators of the deformation for several months.
Cuadrilla has been set by a series of problems, including the minor earthquakes in Lancashire that halted drilling for more than a year, and delays in beginning exploration on other sites. The venture-capital-backed company has so far spent more than £100m in the UK without producing any gas. At present, it is not fracking at all. Earlier in June, the company sold a stake in its operations in the Bowland Shale in Lancashire to Centrica for £40m.
The government is also expected on Thursday to provide updates on the potential for local communities to receive incentives for allowing fracking, and on proposals for tax breaks for the fracking industry. These plans are controversial, as environmental campaigners argue that opting for a new “dash for gas“, as the chancellor George Osborne wants, will lock the UK into a high-carbon future, as any new gas-fired power stations built in the next few years will still be operating in the 2040s, by which time fossil fuels should have been almost entirely phased out for electricity generation.
Fonte: guardian.co.uk
