Why fracking in UK will not fix fuel bills and is economically high risk
Fracking will not ease the UK’s energy crisis or bring down heating bills, but will imperil climate targets, scientists and economists have said, after the prime minister, Liz Truss, made lifting the ban on fracking one of the central planks of her energy strategy.
The technology used for hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks, and the difficulty of extracting gas from the UK’s shale deposits, have not changed markedly in the decade since fracking was first tried in the UK, according to scientists.
While the soaring price of gas might make fracking seem a more attractive proposition, in fact the difficulty of tearing up the UK’s countryside in pursuit of relatively small and hard-to-reach deposits means it remains very doubtful it could ever be profitable.
Jim Watson, professor of energy policy at University College London, said: “There is huge uncertainty about the economic viability of fracking, and it may take a long time to produce relatively small amounts of gas.”
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Fracking in the UK is a very high commercial risk, as the geology is wrong, and almost all of the oil or gas has leaked away millions of years ago. Analyses of the shales recovered while drilling for fracking in Lancashire showed the wrong type of shale and no oil or gas present.”
Even if shale gas could be produced here at the scale needed, it would not make a dent in fuel bills. That is because the gas price is set by international markets, so any gas produced would be sold to the highest bidder and vast amounts would be needed to make any change to the gas price.
Kwasi Kwarteng, now chancellor of the exchequer, acknowledged this in the early stages of the Ukraine
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