Fracking given the go-ahead in Lancashire despite local opposition

[BungoWomble]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-37567866

Can't say it is surprising news. As soon as the government announced they were 'taking the decision away' from the local council who rejected fracking it was a foregone conclusion - why else would they do that after all.

But is absolutely infuriating. What kind of democracy are they still claiming we have in this country of the 'mother of parliaments'. Not to mention, of course, the reason for the initial local rejection, the environmental impact of fracking. Or the general attitude to people who don't live in the rich south-east.

I think people are worrying unnecessarily, the earthquakes really weren't that bad, I'm local.
All the objections I have read mention house prices being affected. Doesn't seem like the locals are looking at the picture with job creation. The visual impact of the sites is minimal once they are up and running by all accounts.
I think the locals were pretty naive if they thought it wouldn't get passed by planning. Why else did the Broughton by-pass get started I'd it wasn't to facilitate fracking lorries?
We need to find something to use as an energy source, what else if not shale gas?

What else? Once again, renewables haven't been really tried in Britain. We're behind the crowd, other countries are going ahead but in Britain as in the US, no, the best we can come up with is that the poorer areas can be freely poisoned - and then freely flooded by rising seas - so that the rich can continue to heat their 6 bed houses to ridiculous temperatures. These fracking wells won't even get the carbon-capture technology that the government's own advisors say is a minimum requirement before they start, that was 'too expensive' too.

We have to find better solutions - and find them now, not in 30 or 50 or some other never-never-land. The richer folk and our pathetic excuse for government needs to remember the reasons for brexit and ask themselves exactly where the value is in this system for those of us on the bottom or middle england.

Oil has been fracked in the UK since the 70's. Europe's largest onshore oil well is Wytch farm in Dorset (50,000 bpd) and uses fracking technology, which has been used around the world for over 60 years.
The only difference today is horizontal drilling, which makes more areas accessible to fracking technology.

BungoWomble I agree with you diagnosis but your cure is the equivalent of self flagellation. No country in the world has managed to use renewables to provide base load. See previous post on how Germany's attempt has actually increased CO2 emissions in surrounding countries.

the best we can come up with is that the poorer areas can be freely poisoned
No the UK can produce its own low carbon shale gas rather than importing it from other countries like your suggestion causes.

so that the rich can continue to heat their 6 bed houses to ridiculous temperatures
Seriously the rich live in houses that are heated to 30 degrees, whilst the poor are forced to live in 20 degrees? La La land anyone?

We have to find better solutions - and find them now
Or else you will turn the lights off and we will live in the dark?
But why?

Is this really an excuse for you to rage against rich people or Brexit? Because it sure isn't anything to do with Facts or actually reducing Co2 emissions whilst keeping the lights on.

OK I threw my toys out of the pram but the facts remain that climate science is not a new thing, the problem with energy has been known for decades. And this is the best the government of one of the richest countries in the world can come up with and has come up with for the last 30 or 40 years. It is sickening. It needed change years ago.

Perhaps some kind of energy rationing for the rich would not be a bad idea. We already have it in effect for the poor, if you don't know that there are people in divided Britain who will be unable to afford heating this winter while the rich will be wasting it unnecessarily then you're really on the other planet.

And of course all profits from fracking should immediately go into renewable energy, but that really is la-la land in modern Britain.

As the European Energy Centre says here, it is not a case of either/or. Both fracking and renewables are needed. To quote, "In order for the UK to meet its GHG emission reduction targets and maintain electricity supply the use of gas is pivotal as a transition fuel to reduce emissions from hydrocarbon based electricity generation". This report says that renewables "have the potential to complement and eventually displace" fossil fuels on a large scale.

A lot of money has been poured into renewables but the technology is still not there to allow them to completely replace other forms of energy generation. They should get there eventually but in the meantime we need to keep the lights on.

Perhaps some kind of energy rationing for the rich would not be a bad idea

That would achieve nothing unless you define "rich" to mean the vast majority of households. The rich don't use enough energy for rationing it to be effective. If you want to significantly reduce energy consumption without affecting the average household that means rationing industry and transport which would hit poor workers hardest.

of course all profits from fracking should immediately go into renewable energy, but that really is la-la land in modern Britain

The UK currently invests nearly £10 billion per year in renewable energy. This is substantially more than the projected annual profits from fracking.

Slightly off-topic but if anyone's interested I've just seen that the prototype Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project is set to be reviewed early next month. Charles Nendry presiding. Impacts not known yet, any more than fracking, so that will be an interesting one to watch.

Charles Hendry, that should have been.

If household use of energy is so low that it makes no impact on national usage then why is it 'rationed' by free market cost at all? Why not put energy production back in the public domain, why not give it away to domestic households free? Why is it only the poorest who can have no heating?

If the profits from fracking are insignificant why not put them into the public purse instead of the private? The private sector won't miss them after all then. Any addition to renewable investment over fossil fuel/ nuclear would be useful.

If household use of energy is so low that it makes no impact on national usage then why is it 'rationed' by free market cost at all

That is not what I said. You were talking about rationing the rich. The point I was making is that rationing the rich would not make a significant difference to the UK's energy usage. They simply don't consume enough energy. You need to ration pretty much everyone if you want to reduce energy usage significantly. Domestic consumption accounts for 29% of energy usage but domestic consumption by the rich is a small proportion of that. How small depends on your definition of "rich".

You hit the nail on the head prh47bridge

The Swansea Bay tidal lagoon is promising new technology and will be interesting to see if its feasible. I wonder if local opposition to it will be overridden!

FYI, Fracking is a very old (100 years), very well understood, very widely used technology. As is nuclear.

If household use of energy is so low that it makes no impact on national usage
Huh? No one has said that

If the profits from fracking are insignificant...
The profits are not insignificant, but the state is useless at running companies for profit, hence we need private business to make companies efficient so that it works.

and never the rich south east being abused and exploited

apart from the bloody great high speed train line? That was strongly objected to as well?

Meanwhile whilst Bungo and friands complain about climate change...
Last year China produced as much steel as the UK ..... so what?

Since the begining of the industrial revolution...

When you think about that statistic... and understand that most of China's power still comes from coal... and not very clean coal generation to boot, it puts the whole climate debate into cold focus.. What do we do by taxing ourselves into bankrupcy trying to protect the climate if we simply import Chinese goods made with the dirtiest energy on the planet?

yip ProfessorPreciseaBug, thats reality.

All reductions in Uk co2 emissions have been more than offset by imports. We have exported CO2 emissions by closing UK companies.

Meanwhile we pay benefits to people who could earn a living if they were not out out of work by the Bungles of the world having an environment lovein.

"Professor" (why on earth do you think you deserve that title) you really are a total waste of my time. But once more - it is not an environmental 'love in'. People are dying over this and will die in their millions. Billions of other life forms have already perished. We're in the middle of one of the biggest extinction events ever. Do you really think you can continue to survive on an empty planet filled only with poison?

As for blaming China and people on benefits. caroldecker is quite right to say we have exported our emissions. I am the person asking for less globalisation and more local self-sufficiency. You are talking complete rot.

Fracking is not a proven technology. It has not been in practice extensively for long. If you have a look again at that Yale Uni article I linked it is quite clear that it is being pushed far faster than either the science or public accountability is being allowed to keep up. Bad effects are being deliberately downplayed by the companies involved.

You sound as if you are one of those who think the private company is always there to benefit the public, a philanthropic principle. What absolute rubbish. The principle of the private company is causing absolute havoc in drug research and environmental research both. Private money is not the people's friend and never has been. We've seen its unrestricted effects before in the Victorian age, the 1980s, and now.

The basic difference is that I have been asking for sustainable local development for a long time. Fracking is from the johnny-come-latelys who discover that yes, there is a problem, and oh no what do we do... throw money at it in the established business model and it'll all go away. Rather than scrap the model that is causing the problem and try something different. It would be funny if so much was not indeed about to go away.

It has not been in practice extensively for long

It has been in commercial operation since 1950. By 2012 over 2.5 million fracking jobs had been performed worldwide in oil and gas wells, over 1 million of them in the US. Fracking of shale is a little more recent but not much - it was definitely under way in 1965 and may have started earlier.

To quote from the "Yale" article (which is journalism by a freelance writer based in Florida which has been published by a magazine associated with Yale - it is not research by Yale University), "The question isn’t ‘can hydraulic fracturing be done safely?’ It’s ‘will it be done safely?’".

Sustainable development is that which meets the needs of the present generation.

If the needs of the present are not being met..... it is not sustainable.

Too many people forget the first part of the equation.

This means that without a huge reduction in the population, we need the energy from fossil fuels because so called renewables do not supply. Gas is part of the energy supply. It is also cleaner to burn than coal. So you don't need to dig up most of the lake district to supply carboniferous limestone for scrubbing the exhaust gasses from burning coal.

Yes it's become common recently, dogged by persistent complaints about water pollution and earthquakes. 2012 is recent.

There are 2 concerns about safety. The first is the process, which in part comes down to 'will it be done safely'. That is a question of trust and there is no good reason to trust private companies pushing ahead of public accountability and the science who have known direct links into the heart of an untrustworthy government.

The second is the question of climate change, and there the evidence is incontrovertible: it cannot be done safely. Arguably with the carbon capture technology it could be made so, but that hasn't been fully researched or implemented either and it won't be here.

Lets get things into perspective..
For about 150 years we were digging coal from deep mines all across the north. Mining subsidence is a way of life for many people.. Indeed there are many areas that can't ever be built on because of mining subsidence. What is the difference between a very small shake and a huge ground heave?

But you are correct, there is always a safety issue. And there is no totally safe process. Indeed there is a new film about the Deepwater Horizon... and don't forget Piper Alpha. The problem is that we need power. And we need lots of it.

Given that 10% of world energy production is used for the Haber Bosch process to make fertiliser and that fertiliser allows food yields to be massively higher thereby supporting a growing population.., We have a global energy problem. Try and imagine a billion hungry Chinese.

Any objection to fracking in the UK will have no effecton energy supply and use in China and India. OTOH, if we restrict our ability to produce our own energy, we are beholden to nice Mr Putin.

I have to say that if there was a gas field below my house and I had the choice of using that or relying on Putin... I would be telling the crews to get drilling...

I can't help but think that people are looking at this whole situation backwards. We have an energy crisis looming, that's a fact. HOWEVER, we can't say "we need X amount of energy and we will provide that energy even if it makes the planet uninhabitable and limits the survival prospects of the human race." We need to look at the energy that we have available, and that is going to have to be sustainable, and we cut our coats according to the cloth we have, not the other way around.

That's not going to be a scenario that everyone is happy to get behind, but actually, what choice do we have if we want to survive?

We already have enough fossil fuels available to us to make the planet uninhabitable. To go looking for more is absolute madness, or to be more specific, is a cynical, short term money making scam for the select few involved. And potentially a death sentence for those it affects.

Just the issue of waste water alone. We don't even know all the chemicals being used during the fracking process. But many of the ones we do know about are well-documented for causing cancer, birth defects, and disorders of the nervous system. The same is true of many naturally occurring but highly toxic substances that are unearthed throughout the process. These materials are disturbed by drilling or fracking, then seep into the water supply. If these penetrate aquifers, particularly in the south and east of England where the majority of people rely on these as their sole source of water, it will be absolutely catastrophic.

We're in the middle of one of the biggest extinction events ever
Crikey tell that to the dinosaurs , I thought over-population was more of a problem.

less globalisation and more local self-sufficiency
But most people don't want to live such a frugal uncomfortable lifestyle. The answer to global warming is more technological advances, not less.

Fracking is not a proven technology
Several million wells have been fracked worldwide so far.

The principle of the private company is causing absolute havoc in drug research

I know those bastards developing drugs that save lives and then expecting us to pay for them. If only we could turn back time to before the Victorian era!

Fracking is from the johnny-come-latelys
How dare these johnny-come-latelys suggest we use a natural low carbon resource to create local jobs and secure our energy supply. We should be creating jobs in Saudi Arabia and Russia and importing our energy from people we have long standing business with.

there is no good reason to trust private companies
That is why we have rules, regulation and LAWS.

the question of climate change, and there the evidence is incontrovertible
How will importing shale gas and exporting jobs help climate change? Where is the evidence?

people rely on these as their sole source of water, it will be absolutely catastrophic
The problem should not occur, as fracking typically involves drilling more than a mile underground - far deeper than the water-bearing rocks (aquifers) from which we get our water supplies

Some areas have complained about high levels of the carcinogen benzene in underground water supplies as a result
In the UK, the Environment Agency says only chemicals non-toxic at small concentrations may be used

Another possibility of contamination occurs where the drill hole goes through the water-bearing rock
This happened a lot in the early days of fracking in the USA and is now considered bad practise because the boreholes were not properly cased to stop leaks.

The other possibility of pollution is when the water, which is mixed with chemicals and sand for the fracking process, comes back to the surface. It can be contaminated with heavy metals and radioactivity
This wastewater needs to be contained in tanks before being disposed of or - preferably - cleaned up to re-use for more fracking