THE CARBON WAR

206
The Winning of The Carbon War
London, 23 rd June 2015
The aspiring drillers of British shale, and their support base, convene for a
morning conference in a hall in the City. Outside the building, a small group
of protestors gathers, led by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. I stop
to talk to them, wearing an unfashionable suit, before going in.
Inside the conference, the geology of British shale deposits is first item on
the agenda. I sit listening to Professor Mike Stephenson, Director of Science
at the British Geological Survey, talking about the Upper Palaeozoic shale
of northern England. I once wrote a research paper entitled “British Lower
Palaeozoic black shales.” Shell and BP both funded part of this work. I google
the title of my paper. It is still there, downloadable today from the web pages
of the Geological Society, whose journal it appeared in back in 1980, eleven
years before the internet became available for use.
Stephenson tells the conference that the Bowland Shale, a deposit of
Carboniferous age stretching across much of the north of England, is by far
the biggest UK shale resource. His team has a median estimate of fully 1,300
trillion cubic feet of gas for the resource. Of course, resources are not reserves,
he reminds us. For calculating reserves, you need to know how much is recoverable.
We don’t really know that, he admits. We don’t know the gas content of
the shale because we haven’t drilled much: nowhere near as much as the Americans.
How much resource can be turned into reserves is therefore impossible
to say. As for the Weald, in southern England, we know there is no shale gas
there. Shale oil perhaps, maybe 4 billion barrels. But there is no gas.
This hardly seems like the resounding basis for a gold rush to me. But
then I have a different belief system to most of the people in this hall.
Tony Grayling of the Environment Agency – the regulator of the aspiring
industry and everything else with environmental implications – speaks next.
It is not our role to decide if shale gas is extracted, he begins, that is for society
to decide. Our role is to weigh the environmental risks. We feel the risk of
water pollution from fractures in fracking is low at the depths targeted by the
drillers. Key risks are at the surface and in borehole construction and operation.
In that regard, we won’t allow drilling in protected groundwater source areas.
The drillers must publish the chemicals they use. Waste liquids produced from
fracking must be stored on site in sealed containers and taken to wastewater
treatment sites by lorry: drillers won’t be allowed to store them in open pools
and pump them back underground like they are in America. We will not allow