One of the saner Greenies, Baroness Worthington, has today come out to say that Fracking is not the end of the world and that the Environmentalists were wrong to be so actively hateful of it. In an outbreak of near sanity she noted that Britain would need gas for decades to come and that if we did not frack it ourselves we would only be importing it from Qatar anyway.
Of course, Greenpeace et al just moan that all greenhouse gas is bad and that we should be aiming for clean renewables anyway within 10 years. To call that a fantastical position is an insult to fantasy.
Baroness Worthington does thought have a nice pay off line in that any Fracking should be done with Carbon capture and storage equipment so that no green house emissions are created; as we know, there is no actual carbon capture and storage technology available and this remains another Greenie pipedream on the same level as imagining massive tidal power stations out of the text books and into operation.
It did make me realise though that whilst the collapse of oil prices has done little to affect the US shale output the UK output remains at, er, zero. Three years ago the Government was championing the shale revolution. In between times there have been a couple of drills and lots of protests by Greens and some chicken local planning offices. In June the Government moved to make planing applications more fast track than previously; but this shows how nascent the industry still is. Truth be told it is still in the planning and theory stages only after several years of pushing.
With market prices unlikely to recover in the near future all but those like Caudrilla (who have no other assets to play with) are not hurrying to move things forward. Which is a shame, because cancelling the disastrous Hinkley Point project and pouring the saved funds into the Fracking industry would prove bounteous for the UK in terms of lowering energy cots and risks for the forseeable future.
