Looking at new North Sea gas supplies may not be palatable but is pragmatic
The first lesson of the gas crisis is old and boring: the UK should get serious about insulating its leaky properties. If all homes that have energy performance certificate band D were upgraded to band C, the UK’s total gas demand would fall by 7%, and imports by 15%, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit calculates. Given the UK’s wretched record in insulation versus European peers, that sounds a small but easy win.
The second part – the supply side – is where the trickier stuff starts. The broad energy direction has been set towards nuclear and renewables, but there’s no getting away from the fact that gas will be in the mix for a long time yet. Virtually all transition scenarios imagine it, and you have to be an extreme optimist to believe UK consumers can quickly be converted to the joys of heat pumps.
Thus, from one quarter, comes a call for a fracking revolution under Lancashire. Readers of the Mail on Sunday at the weekend were treated to a blast in the form of Nigel Farage’s refrain about how “net zero is net stupid” and that the answer to our energy woes is homegrown shale gas. Prepare to hear more in similar style. As UK wholesale gas prices reach unheard-of levels, a well-resourced fracking lobby has reassembled.
It is therefore reassuring to know that the secretary of state for business and energy is having none of it. Kwasi Kwarteng wrote a sensible piece in the same paper that backed more homegrown nuclear and more renewables and pointed out the drawbacks with fracking. The gas would take a decade to arrive in volume even if the moratorium were lifted tomorrow. Local planning conditions in densely populated areas are severe; what works in Texas won’t do in Lancashire. One can add that the economics of UK
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