Tories grant 18 fracking licences - all north of Leicester

dirtychinchilla said:
Fracking is no good. I can't comprehend why the Tories love it so much. The evidence shows that it has a detrimental effect on the local environment, and with the renewables we have available to us, it's completely ridiculous. I'm glad I don't live near them, but I don't want anyone to live near them at all.
Click to expand...

Because its cheap. Look what its done to prices in the States? Thats the problem with any government we have here. Short term gains.

For example, if a proportion of national insurance each year had been invested in a pension fund, then there would be more than enough money to pay for current pensions now. As it is, the amount of money needed to pay basic state pension will become more than the tax collected from working people in the not to distant future.

Same with selling off assets. Quick gain of a few billion and helps balances the books or to give tax breaks. Long term it might not be the best for the country.
 
They should bury Camermoron down one of those fracking holes, then in a million years or so he'll be of some use.
 
Greebo said:
Because its cheap. Look what its done to prices in the States? Thats the problem with any government we have here. Short term gains.

For example, if a proportion of national insurance each year had been invested in a pension fund, then there would be more than enough money to pay for current pensions now. As it is, the amount of money needed to pay basic state pension will become more than the tax collected from working people in the not to distant future.

Same with selling off assets. Quick gain of a few billion and helps balances the books or to give tax breaks. Long term it might not be the best for the country.
Click to expand...

The ideal situation would be to do both wouldn't it? Use fracking to either subsidise the green development or to provide a price cut/price buffer for consumers in the event of wholesale price increases.

Whilst the fracking is keeping the price down invest heavily in green energy and hope you have the infrastructure in place before the supply runs out.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Is fracking even commercially viable with current low oil prices?
Click to expand...

Fracking in the UK is currently about gas, which is broadly disconnected from the oil price. Gas prices have dropped recently, but not to the same extent as Oil.

dirtychinchilla said:
Fracking is no good. I can't comprehend why the Tories love it so much. The evidence shows that it has a detrimental effect on the local environment, and with the renewables we have available to us, it's completely ridiculous. I'm glad I don't live near them, but I don't want anyone to live near them at all.
Click to expand...

Cherry picked evidence from the U.S. Has shown that in some cases unconventional hydrocarbon extraction has caused problems. Usually those problems are directly related to open containment pools* which are banned in the UK, toxic chemicals** which are banned in the UK, or illegal dumping of fracking fluid, or even more incongruously spreading it on the roads in winter. :confused:

We have much greater regulation in the UK than the U.S., as well as the benefit of 30 years of experience form the U.S. Unfortunately many antis only look at US data and ignore UK data of the same type and/or are still arguing points based on outdated practices in the U.S.

*degassing of the fluids In the containment pools causing increased proportions of chemicals like benzene and methane around the well pad and holes in the membrane causing leaks into nearby water sources. In the UK all fracking fluid and flow back water is and will be contained in above ground metal tanks, like it has been here for decades.

**All chemicals, compositions and proportions have to be authorises by the EA prior to any work (requirement of planning permission). Chemicals have to be non toxic and the names and proportions of chemicals will/are available to the public.
 
scorza said:
Apart from the earthquakes you mean?
Click to expand...

How much did that affect Blackpool? To put it in perspective a train going past produces a larger magnitude event at surface than the two Blackpool events.

Then of course there are things like quarrying, digging up roads/building work/trucks going past and the myriad other man made vibrations with larger surface magnitudes than those two events.

There's also a traffic light monitoring system in place now in the UK which means any event over 0.5M means a shutdown of work. To put that into perspective, O&G companies are struggling to get monitoring systems that will actually pick up events of that small size.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...fographic_Traffic-light-system_finaldec13.pdf for more info.

There are also requirements against fracking near faults and a requirement to have 3D seismic over the area you want to frack.
 
AlecR said:
I studied fracking in some detail this year and there is very little scientific evidence against it.

Most of the evidence is unsubstantiated rubbish.
Click to expand...

Maybe you can clear something up for me.

Various articles and TV programmes I've seen suggest that fracking actually causes water /loss/. Something I didn't even know was possible.

Eg top result from Google:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gas

Apparently, water used for fracking is pumped so deep that it is lost to the water cycles for thousands of years? Hence you can end up causing droughts by pumping all your water miles underground.

What are your thoughts on this? This to me is the most concerning aspect of what I've read/heard.
 
AlecR said:
There is virtually no evidence that fracking is "detrimental" to the environment...
Click to expand...

o...k...

Oklahoma averaged a handful of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater from 1975 to 2008.

Then, in 2009, it had 20.

In 2011, the number of earthquakes in the state rose to over 60, and Oklahoma was hit by its largest earthquake in recorded history – magnitude 5.7. Immediately after the quake Katie Keranan, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, partnered with scientists from the USGS and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to install two dozen seismometers in Prague.
Prague, Oklahoma

Within a year, Keranan had data that indicated that the pressure from injecting water deep beneath the earth had snapped three fault planes, one after the other.
Click to expand...

US government says drilling causes earthquakes

Fast forward to 2015 and..

The state is having an average of 2.5 earthquakes of at least magnitude 3 every day, when it used to average only 1.5 a year.
Click to expand...

http://uk.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-fracking-causes-earthquakes-2015-4?r=US&IR=T
 
Last edited:
FoxEye said:
Apparently, water used for fracking is pumped so deep that it is lost to the water cycles for thousands of years? Hence you can end up causing droughts by pumping all your water miles underground.

What are your thoughts on this? This to me is the most concerning aspect of what I've read/heard.
Click to expand...

Are you serious ? Do you have even the slightest clue just how much water would need to be pumped underground to cause a drought ? Average rainfall per annum is measured in trillions of gallons over a given area. A few million gallons pumped into a fracking well isn't going to affect our climate.
 
LordSplodge said:
...and contamination of the drinking water supply. I mean fire coming out of taps sounds cool but being poisoned by drinking water less so.
Click to expand...

Any evidence for that? Please don't say Gaslands, the "fictional" documentary is not a reliable source. The problem with that documentary is it doesn't differentiate between the natural methane seeps that are present throughout many parts of the U.S. Flaming taps have been present years before any O&G exploration occurred anywhere near those locations.

There has been contamination of water, almost entirely due to what I mentioned in an earlier post. It all comes from surface contamination, mostly from practices that are banned in the UK (the vast majority of the rest from illegal dumping).

That said there have apparently been cases caused by problems with casing but that is more an O&G issue industry wide, rather than unconventional and hasn't affected the UK due to much more stringent regulation.

The most important things to remember regarding the UK (rather than the U.S. - see my point earlier about people using arguments based on US data that is irrelevant in the UK) are that almost no one gets their water from personal boreholes in the UK. It's all mains water. And there is a requirement to drill testing boreholes around any fracking well. Groundwater is then tested before, during and after fracks to check for any contamination.

The reality is we'll probably don't that the groundwater is contaminated, by fertilisers and pesticides from farming and not stimulation chemicals. :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom