They call themselves the “Nanas”, a common nickname for grandmothers in Great Britain. Wearing yellow jackets and holding slogans against fracking, they have been protesting against this form of gas production in Lancashire for years. And if need be, they are ready to start the protests again straight away.
“We will pull out all the stops,” Tina Rothery told the Guardian. The 60-year-old, who has been arrested seven times at demonstrations in the past, came straight back to the Preston New Road drilling site near Blackpool, north-west of Manchester, after hearing the news: New Prime Minister Liz Truss had lifted the moratorium on fracking announced.
“It won’t just be demonstrations. We will fight back with legal challenges, building permits.” Rothery warned that they would drum up everything to reinforce their resistance.
Truss had also announced that the 2019 moratorium on fracking in England would be lifted as part of its billion-dollar energy emergency plan, which, among other things, relieves private households with a cap on electricity and gas prices for two years.
“The gas could flow again in six months,” she had promised. Along with other measures, fracking should help make the country less dependent on gas imports.
Many details of the plan are open. Drilling permits should only be granted where there is regional approval. In Lancashire, the only region in the country where gas has been drilled, skepticism is high. Tremors, dishes falling off shelves, cracks in buildings are experiences people have had around the wells.
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, extracts natural gas from rock and deep geological layers. A mixture of water, sand and chemicals is pumped down at high pressure to loosen the gas from deep layers of rock and bring it to the surface.
In some regions of North America, the process has been practiced for years. In Europe, on the other hand, it is controversial. Germany, the Netherlands and France are among the states that have imposed a ban. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales also refrain from fracking out of concern for the environment.
Francis Egan, CEO of Quadrilla, the only company that has started drilling in the country so far, spoke of a “thriving shale gas industry” that will create jobs. “If we get this right, the award is a working energy strategy for the 21st century, delivering security of supply, economic prosperity and vital support for the British public.”
Quadrilla’s drilling in Lancashire led to the moratorium in 2019. Tremors of up to 2.9 on the Richter scale were measured during drilling.
Truss predecessor Boris Johnson was already skeptical about the advantages of this form of energy production. At the end of August he said he had doubts as to whether fracking could be implemented in a sensible and cost-effective manner on the British Isles. “I have, I have to say, my doubts that it will prove to be a panacea.”
However, the topic was never completely settled. In April, then-Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng commissioned an investigation by the British Geological Survey to see whether new technical methods or findings might justify a new attempt. The analysis has been available for a few weeks but has not yet been published.
Much of the known shale gas deposit is in the center of the country, between Stoke-on-Trent and York. Gas has also been found south of London, in the so-called Weald, as well as in southern Wales and near Glasgow. According to Quadrilla, extracting just 10 percent of the deposit in the north would be enough to cover current gas consumption for 50 years.
Many geologists are significantly more skeptical. Existing gas is by no means synonymous with gas that can be economically extracted. In addition, the geology in England is not the right one, the amounts of oil and gas found in the rock are small and the quality is significantly lower than in the USA, said Stuart Haszeldine from the School of Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh. The dense population of the country and the ownership of land are also regularly cited as crucial differences to the situation in North America.
There is also the political dimension. A small group of Conservative MPs known as the Net Zero Scrutiny Group has been campaigning for months to restart fracking drilling. But in a number of affected constituencies, many of which fell to the Conservatives for the first time in the last election in 2019, sentiment is firmly against fracking.
There are also considerable reservations in the government. Even if the moratorium were lifted, it would likely be a decade before meaningful amounts could be mined, Kwarteng, who is now finance minister, wrote in an op-ed in March. “And it would come at a great cost to our community and our precious nature.”
On the other hand, other measures that Truss has announced to expand the domestic energy supply are much less controversial, even if they cannot be implemented immediately. These include new licenses for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. Approval and the construction of new nuclear power plants are also to be promoted.
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