[Music]
I’d like to talk to you tonight
particularly about the financial
implications of fracking and the
regulatory aspects of it I’m not going
to do too much on the geology although
that evident that comes into it people
talk about the shale revolution in the
US as if it’s been an enormous success
story and this is nonsense it’s not true
at all
it’s been a financial disaster it’s a
huge Ponzi scheme which is unsustainable
and not many people know this I’m using
the Wild West metaphor for obvious
reasons but partly because there are
about 12 shale basins in the US none of
which have made any money overall but
they are the one that is nearest to
being financially feasible at the moment
it’s called the Permian Basin in West
Texas West Texas is an interesting place
it’s sagebrush desert if you remember
the film Paris Texas by VIN vendors in
1984 with that sad lost soul played by
Harry Dean Stanton and the lovely slide
guitar music of rye CUDA well all that
was shot in the Permian Basin the big
wide-open spaces of the western Texan
desert so that area is a million miles
culturally and climate climatologically
and geologically from anything we have
in the UK so it’s going to be very
difficult to emulate it in in Britain
the break-even price for the Permian
Basin oil was estimated as an average of
61 dollars about a year ago and the
current price of oil wind up recently
but still only at 55 dollars so even in
the best basin in the u.s. it’s uh neck
anomic curiously enough no one has tried
to put together a global set of figures
for the overall shale bubble in the US
because that’s what it’s been
it’s about eight or ten years of peak
activity peaking in 2011 and since 2015
it’s all collapsing just for the gas
figures M we can calculate pretty
accurately from government figures in
the US the money made by the sale of gas
produced by shale fracking and that’s
the blue figure at the top of that table
but the cost of doing this has been
coerced from drilling the whales that’s
the next figure down in red and then you
have – I adore and I’ve done a
conservative 20 percent addition for
paying royalties and leases and interest
payments and all that sort of thing and
last but not least all these gas
companies have survived by selling debt
this means they offer bonds to people
who are mug enough to buy them they sell
debt which is a promise you know you
give us your money and we promise we’ll
pay you back in say five years time or
six years time now if you add up all
those red figures in round terms for the
whole shale gas industry over this main
period that I’m talking about here you
can see that the red figures are in
round terms double the income from the
sale of the gas you might argue ah but
we’ve done the upfront infrastructure
investment in drilling all the whales so
there’s still gas and money to be made
into the future but the fact is shale
gas wells decline very rapidly this is a
curve that shoots down like this as
shown in the example in the bottom
left-hand corner of one basin the
Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania what
this shows and all the other basins have
a similar geometry all the gas or most
of the gas is produced in the first 18
months to two years of the lifetime of
the whale and after five to eight years
the whale is dead now given that most of
the gas wells in the US are now over
five years old they’ve all had their
life and we can’t expect much more than
a dribble of future income to come out
these whales so in other words it’s
unsustainable just economically speaking
nevermind the environmental costs now
just to explain what fracking is all
about you’ve probably familiar with
these kind of diagrams and it’s all
about drilling a whale vertically down
to a shale horizon and then with
technology that came in to maturity
about 15 or 20 years ago
you can drill horizontally along the
shale you then apply water mixed with
sand under very high pressure indeed
like 50 times the pressure in your car
tires and that literally cracks the
shale apart the sand proppant it’s
called goes into the cracks and then
when you’ve released the pressure after
you finished the fracking process the
new cracks are held open by the grains
of sand and this enables the oil or gas
to come out and it goes back up the
whale now these pictures always use a
very simplified geology we call it
layer-cake geology just flat layers like
that and which is not anything like most
of the geology in Europe and certainly
not in Britain in the sedimentary basins
with shale however it does seem to apply
it is more or less true for a lot of the
American shale basins but in Britain the
geology is more complex
our basins are pervaded and sliced up by
lots of geological faults and these are
now known by calculation and by
empirical experience we know that they
are conduits for water and fluid
contamination to come up from a shale
layer up to the groundwater zones the
crucial groundwater resources near the
surface of the earth so this is a
fundamental difference between British
shale basins and their American
counterparts
now shale gas exploration started in
2011 in Lancashire with Cuadrilla
drilling a well at a place called pries
Hall number one
and they’d no sooner drilled it they
went through a fault zone hahaha
they said hadn’t expected and the fault
moves because of the fluid being trapped
into it and triggered some earthquakes
so the government called a halt there
was a moratorium on fracking they asked
for a committee of experts which was set
up by a combination of the Royal Society
and the Royal Academy of Engineering
this joint society report met it was a
working group of eight people of whom of
whom four were scientists and they
reported in 2012 a year later and and
I’m very critical of their report
because they were so hung up on the
problem of earthquake triggering which
in my mind is quite a side issue it’s a
sideshow they forgot to talk about the
main issue which is the faulting in the
British basins and the potential for
pollution to go from fracking layers
deep down up to the surface to affect
our water resources they also very
naively placed a lot of importance on a
paper published by – Halliburton
engineering geologists published in a
sort of house magazine and they declared
from their database of about 10,000 u.s.
frack whales that Halliburton had access
to that the pollution from fracking down
here couldn’t possibly get to the water
resources up near the surface of the
earth but the Halliburton guys didn’t
take into account the existence of
faults which is a the important thing in
Britain
so the next part of my talk is about how
and whether I should say that the expert
committee concluded that the that
fracking would be safe in Britain as
long as it was properly regulated that’s
the crucial point they made so the next
question is is the regulation in Britain
up to scratch or isn’t it and I’m going
to look at several case histories and
and just to continue my overall metaphor
for this story you’ve heard in the news
all the problems that Theresa May has in
our cabinet including the infighting I
can’t resist just showing you a photo of
the of Teresa may’s cabinet at work
that’s the infighting going on at
westminster but seriously the regulation
starts with the issue of licenses by the
oil and gas authority it was formally
debt and before that it was the
Department of Energy they used to have a
very robust system for giving out
licenses the companies had to be very
sound they knew what they were doing
they had to spend lots of money drilling
wells and so on but in recent years in
the last three years the licenses have
now been handed out all over the place
like sweeties so that part of the
regulatory system is failing next down
the line we have the County Council’s
who are supposed to issue permits to
drill and they are being pressed on by
the government and they are failing in
various ways for example there was a
recent well-drilled at broad footbridge
by a company called you Cal you cog UK
all and gas they were using an existing
permit issued by West Sussex County
Council where they quite explicitly had
to go from the drilling pad here down
through a fault zone but more or less
vertically to an Orthodox sandstone
layer here a conventional target for
finding oil but what did you cog do they
started at the drill pad and went off in
a different direction and at a very
shallow angle off to explore some shale
so they are clearly breaching the
permission their planning permission to
drill but West Sussex County Council
have done nothing about it
there’s another recent example of Angus
Energy drilling it broken in Surrey and
here the County Council Surry County
Council in this case were a bit heavier
on the company they insisted that you
don’t have permission to drill and it
turns out to cut a long story short that
the permit that the company were relying
on actually ran out ten years ago but
again what’s happened all that’s
happened is that Surry County Council
have now asked them to apply
retrospectively
to for permission to drill the well that
they’ve already drilled so again they’re
rolling over and this aspect of the
legislation and the regulation is
clearly extremely weak in other words
the under the present climate run by
this current Tory government at
Westminster the companies feel they can
run a horse and cart through the whole
permitting system I don’t think it’s
working at all well now this is a rather
complex slide and with good reason
first of all I want to draw your
attention to the pre sole number one
well shown as a dotted line over at the
left-hand side of the picture this is
the famous well that was drilled in 2011
and triggered the earthquakes well that
worked well produced some flow back
which is highly saline of radioactive
and polluted water from the fracking
process and it was stored on-site it was
only one tanker fool wasn’t that much in
global terms but this highly
contaminated water was stored on-site no
water waste treatment plant was
available to deal with it so the company
eventually secretly dumped it in the
Manchester Ship Canal but what’s
happened the Health and Safety Executive
just gave them retrospective permission
to do what they’d already done now the
next main point of this slide is that
Cuadrilla are now in the process of
drilling
fracking at two sites pressed a new road
on the left and a bit further to the
right they’ll be drilling next year at
Rosica wood and they’re going to be
fracking in the zones marked in blue
where the whale turns horizontal now you
can see from the complexity of the
thoughts cutting through all this
geology it’s going to be very hard for
them to avoid inadvertently or otherwise
fracking through fault zones and thereby
permitting contaminated fluid to get up
to near the surface now here’s where the
Environment Agency comes in they are
supposed to regulate things like the
purity of water and the only issue
permits to drill if they think
everything is safe now the biggest
groundwater resource in northwest
England lies just to the right that is
to the east
it’s where that yellow rock which is a
sandstone is at the surface of the earth
and the Environment Agency story about
how the groundwater system works is
quite correct over on the east side that
is rain falls on the bowl and fails and
it passes through fault zones into that
sandstone and this is where there’s a
lot of water Wales to feed the whole
Manchester Liverpool conurbation but
what the EEA says is somehow rather the
major fault cutting right through this
whole system the woods fault fault is a
barrier to flow so this fault is
exceptional unlike the other faults just
to the east now I disagree with them mmm
the EA is saying that all the sandstone
containing water under the filed and
above where Cuadrilla is about to start
fracking is just saline water and is of
no interest to the public as far as a
water resources concern but I found I’ve
done my own research on this I have
found two historical water wells which
were drilled very deep down about three
or 400 metres into that sandstone one of
them was for a cotton spinning mill and
at Kirkham in the 19th century it had a
giant steam engine which used water
that well and in the mid 20th century
there was another deep well into that
sandstone used for a dairy and for
cheese making now I don’t believe that
either of those two wells were using
highly saline water they must have been
tapping into fresh water contrary to
what the EA would have us believe
furthermore I’ve rediscovered going to
the west of Preston new road there’s a
fault there mark just to the west which
actually had been mapped by two separate
oil industry outfits back in the 70s or
80s and all I’ve done is remap it and it
goes right up to the surface just to the
west to press a new road this could be a
conduit for water which I believe goes
all the way from east to west and out
towards the Irish Sea but some of it
could come up that fault zone and this
is really account for why there is a
little lake marked in a little blob on
the map there which is fed by four
freshwater Springs and this is another
sign that there may be fresh water
coming back up to the surface so all
that is at risk of contamination if
Cuadrilla goes ahead and Frank’s now I
want to turn to two pernicious
definitions introduced by the government
and put in without consultation into the
infrastructure Act of 2015 the Tory
government have decided that fracking is
a national infrastructure project and
that’s why they’re taking powers away
from local people and County Council’s
they are taking it all back to
Westminster and they’re overruling the
wishes of several local councils the
first definition which is specious is
that they define what is meant by
unconventional resources from
conventional resources in a different
way from the scientific convention and
the way we do this is by the
permeability of the rocks and the figure
that universally used is below a value
of naught point 1 which is the line
running down in the middle with this
diagram the stuff to the left
that’s an unconventional resource and of
course it includes shale shown by the
black area to the left very low
permeability rock over to the right
there is sandstone and limestone but
there is also things called tight
limestone’s and sandstones which are
unconventional and they need stimulation
which is either acidification or
fracking to get the oil or gas out of
them but the government has
simplistically defined in a kind of
schoolboy manner limestone and sandstone
is conventional shale is unconventional
this is going to enable companies now
operating particularly in Sussex to get
round the rules and what is meant by
unconventional or not and the second
specious definition introduced by the
government is because we’re talking
about high volume hydraulic fracturing
meaning the kind of fracking used to
break up shale what is the definition of
high volume the government has picked a
figure a very high figure ten thousand
cubic meters of water per well this is
the threshold to define it as high
volume fracking but if you look at data
published by the US Geological Survey
some of their hydrogeologists they’ve
used a huge database so this is an
empirical evidence based result of over
a quarter of a million fracked Wells in
the US as shown by that map there what
you can say just to cut a long story
short from their results is that it will
be unconventional as a gas well if
you’ve used more than two and a half
thousand cubic meters of water and for
an oil well even lower two thousand
cubic meters and above that you can say
it’s unconventional so the government’s
figure has been deliberately set in
Britain very high at ten thousand cubic
meters this will enable for example
companies in Sussex and drilling in the
Weald they may decide to frack a well
and stop at nine thousand nine hundred
cubic meters and then
say we’re not frightened because legally
this is not high volume hydraulic
fracking and this is what the Royals
allowed you that you know they’re not
fracking so we have an Orwellian
situation here of Newspeak new
definitions introduced by the Tory
government so just to round off fracking
um not only is a ton economic in the
u.s. it has never made a profit and it
certainly won’t be economic in Britain
where the costs of doing so if it ever
gets going will be far higher than the
u.s. it’s a polluting kind of industry I
think that is now well known and it
certainly doesn’t have a social license
to operate and I take my hands off to
the protesters although we should call
them protectors of the environment who
are now out there at the various
drilling sites in North Yorkshire the
East Midlands Lancashire of course and
down in the Weald in Sussex they are out
there every day trying to stop the
industry in its tracks to delay it and
obstruct it and challenge it legally and
even taking direct action I support what
they are doing and in fact in the long
run they will be doing the financial
investors a favor because eventually I
think these investors will wake up and
realize the game is not worth the candle
is never going to make any money so
we’ll pull the plug on it and this is
what I hope will happen reluctantly in
Britain and in France where I live down
in the south there was a there was a
license to frack awarded in 2009 to a
small company it was called the planes
of the longer dock license a huge
license but France had the wisdom to
cancel all the fracking licenses in 2011
so since then we have not had a problem
in our locality in France or anywhere
else for that matter
with the danger of being in a fracking
zone but recently president macro has
gone even further he announced in August
that France will no longer
no longer permit any future oil or gas
exploration . so france is really
looking forward to a future without
fossil fuels and i think this is a good
thing and of course other countries as
you’ve heard no doubt have already
banned fracking France Germany Scotland
of course Northern Ireland Republic of
Ireland Wales the state of New York the
state of Maryland Bulgaria and so on
they have all banned fracking on sound
environmental and legal reasons and I
just hope that England will be dragged
into this new era and will follow suit
sooner rather than later thank you very
much
[Applause]
[Music]
I’d like to talk to you tonight
particularly about the financial
implications of fracking and the
regulatory aspects of it I’m not going
to do too much on the geology although
that evident that comes into it people
talk about the shale revolution in the
US as if it’s been an enormous success
story and this is nonsense it’s not true
at all
it’s been a financial disaster it’s a
huge Ponzi scheme which is unsustainable
and not many people know this I’m using
the Wild West metaphor for obvious
reasons but partly because there are
about 12 shale basins in the US none of
which have made any money overall but
they are the one that is nearest to
being financially feasible at the moment
it’s called the Permian Basin in West
Texas West Texas is an interesting place
it’s sagebrush desert if you remember
the film Paris Texas by VIN vendors in
1984 with that sad lost soul played by
Harry Dean Stanton and the lovely slide
guitar music of rye CUDA well all that
was shot in the Permian Basin the big
wide-open spaces of the western Texan
desert so that area is a million miles
culturally and climate climatologically
and geologically from anything we have
in the UK so it’s going to be very
difficult to emulate it in in Britain
the break-even price for the Permian
Basin oil was estimated as an average of
61 dollars about a year ago and the
current price of oil wind up recently
but still only at 55 dollars so even in
the best basin in the u.s. it’s uh neck
anomic curiously enough no one has tried
to put together a global set of figures
for the overall shale bubble in the US
because that’s what it’s been
it’s about eight or ten years of peak
activity peaking in 2011 and since 2015
it’s all collapsing just for the gas
figures M we can calculate pretty
accurately from government figures in
the US the money made by the sale of gas
produced by shale fracking and that’s
the blue figure at the top of that table
but the cost of doing this has been
coerced from drilling the whales that’s
the next figure down in red and then you
have – I adore and I’ve done a
conservative 20 percent addition for
paying royalties and leases and interest
payments and all that sort of thing and
last but not least all these gas
companies have survived by selling debt
this means they offer bonds to people
who are mug enough to buy them they sell
debt which is a promise you know you
give us your money and we promise we’ll
pay you back in say five years time or
six years time now if you add up all
those red figures in round terms for the
whole shale gas industry over this main
period that I’m talking about here you
can see that the red figures are in
round terms double the income from the
sale of the gas you might argue ah but
we’ve done the upfront infrastructure
investment in drilling all the whales so
there’s still gas and money to be made
into the future but the fact is shale
gas wells decline very rapidly this is a
curve that shoots down like this as
shown in the example in the bottom
left-hand corner of one basin the
Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania what
this shows and all the other basins have
a similar geometry all the gas or most
of the gas is produced in the first 18
months to two years of the lifetime of
the whale and after five to eight years
the whale is dead now given that most of
the gas wells in the US are now over
five years old they’ve all had their
life and we can’t expect much more than
a dribble of future income to come out
these whales so in other words it’s
unsustainable just economically speaking
nevermind the environmental costs now
just to explain what fracking is all
about you’ve probably familiar with
these kind of diagrams and it’s all
about drilling a whale vertically down
to a shale horizon and then with
technology that came in to maturity
about 15 or 20 years ago
you can drill horizontally along the
shale you then apply water mixed with
sand under very high pressure indeed
like 50 times the pressure in your car
tires and that literally cracks the
shale apart the sand proppant it’s
called goes into the cracks and then
when you’ve released the pressure after
you finished the fracking process the
new cracks are held open by the grains
of sand and this enables the oil or gas
to come out and it goes back up the
whale now these pictures always use a
very simplified geology we call it
layer-cake geology just flat layers like
that and which is not anything like most
of the geology in Europe and certainly
not in Britain in the sedimentary basins
with shale however it does seem to apply
it is more or less true for a lot of the
American shale basins but in Britain the
geology is more complex
our basins are pervaded and sliced up by
lots of geological faults and these are
now known by calculation and by
empirical experience we know that they
are conduits for water and fluid
contamination to come up from a shale
layer up to the groundwater zones the
crucial groundwater resources near the
surface of the earth so this is a
fundamental difference between British
shale basins and their American
counterparts
now shale gas exploration started in
2011 in Lancashire with Cuadrilla
drilling a well at a place called pries
Hall number one
and they’d no sooner drilled it they
went through a fault zone hahaha
they said hadn’t expected and the fault
moves because of the fluid being trapped
into it and triggered some earthquakes
so the government called a halt there
was a moratorium on fracking they asked
for a committee of experts which was set
up by a combination of the Royal Society
and the Royal Academy of Engineering
this joint society report met it was a
working group of eight people of whom of
whom four were scientists and they
reported in 2012 a year later and and
I’m very critical of their report
because they were so hung up on the
problem of earthquake triggering which
in my mind is quite a side issue it’s a
sideshow they forgot to talk about the
main issue which is the faulting in the
British basins and the potential for
pollution to go from fracking layers
deep down up to the surface to affect
our water resources they also very
naively placed a lot of importance on a
paper published by – Halliburton
engineering geologists published in a
sort of house magazine and they declared
from their database of about 10,000 u.s.
frack whales that Halliburton had access
to that the pollution from fracking down
here couldn’t possibly get to the water
resources up near the surface of the
earth but the Halliburton guys didn’t
take into account the existence of
faults which is a the important thing in
Britain
so the next part of my talk is about how
and whether I should say that the expert
committee concluded that the that
fracking would be safe in Britain as
long as it was properly regulated that’s
the crucial point they made so the next
question is is the regulation in Britain
up to scratch or isn’t it and I’m going
to look at several case histories and
and just to continue my overall metaphor
for this story you’ve heard in the news
all the problems that Theresa May has in
our cabinet including the infighting I
can’t resist just showing you a photo of
the of Teresa may’s cabinet at work
that’s the infighting going on at
westminster but seriously the regulation
starts with the issue of licenses by the
oil and gas authority it was formally
debt and before that it was the
Department of Energy they used to have a
very robust system for giving out
licenses the companies had to be very
sound they knew what they were doing
they had to spend lots of money drilling
wells and so on but in recent years in
the last three years the licenses have
now been handed out all over the place
like sweeties so that part of the
regulatory system is failing next down
the line we have the County Council’s
who are supposed to issue permits to
drill and they are being pressed on by
the government and they are failing in
various ways for example there was a
recent well-drilled at broad footbridge
by a company called you Cal you cog UK
all and gas they were using an existing
permit issued by West Sussex County
Council where they quite explicitly had
to go from the drilling pad here down
through a fault zone but more or less
vertically to an Orthodox sandstone
layer here a conventional target for
finding oil but what did you cog do they
started at the drill pad and went off in
a different direction and at a very
shallow angle off to explore some shale
so they are clearly breaching the
permission their planning permission to
drill but West Sussex County Council
have done nothing about it
there’s another recent example of Angus
Energy drilling it broken in Surrey and
here the County Council Surry County
Council in this case were a bit heavier
on the company they insisted that you
don’t have permission to drill and it
turns out to cut a long story short that
the permit that the company were relying
on actually ran out ten years ago but
again what’s happened all that’s
happened is that Surry County Council
have now asked them to apply
retrospectively
to for permission to drill the well that
they’ve already drilled so again they’re
rolling over and this aspect of the
legislation and the regulation is
clearly extremely weak in other words
the under the present climate run by
this current Tory government at
Westminster the companies feel they can
run a horse and cart through the whole
permitting system I don’t think it’s
working at all well now this is a rather
complex slide and with good reason
first of all I want to draw your
attention to the pre sole number one
well shown as a dotted line over at the
left-hand side of the picture this is
the famous well that was drilled in 2011
and triggered the earthquakes well that
worked well produced some flow back
which is highly saline of radioactive
and polluted water from the fracking
process and it was stored on-site it was
only one tanker fool wasn’t that much in
global terms but this highly
contaminated water was stored on-site no
water waste treatment plant was
available to deal with it so the company
eventually secretly dumped it in the
Manchester Ship Canal but what’s
happened the Health and Safety Executive
just gave them retrospective permission
to do what they’d already done now the
next main point of this slide is that
Cuadrilla are now in the process of
drilling
fracking at two sites pressed a new road
on the left and a bit further to the
right they’ll be drilling next year at
Rosica wood and they’re going to be
fracking in the zones marked in blue
where the whale turns horizontal now you
can see from the complexity of the
thoughts cutting through all this
geology it’s going to be very hard for
them to avoid inadvertently or otherwise
fracking through fault zones and thereby
permitting contaminated fluid to get up
to near the surface now here’s where the
Environment Agency comes in they are
supposed to regulate things like the
purity of water and the only issue
permits to drill if they think
everything is safe now the biggest
groundwater resource in northwest
England lies just to the right that is
to the east
it’s where that yellow rock which is a
sandstone is at the surface of the earth
and the Environment Agency story about
how the groundwater system works is
quite correct over on the east side that
is rain falls on the bowl and fails and
it passes through fault zones into that
sandstone and this is where there’s a
lot of water Wales to feed the whole
Manchester Liverpool conurbation but
what the EEA says is somehow rather the
major fault cutting right through this
whole system the woods fault fault is a
barrier to flow so this fault is
exceptional unlike the other faults just
to the east now I disagree with them mmm
the EA is saying that all the sandstone
containing water under the filed and
above where Cuadrilla is about to start
fracking is just saline water and is of
no interest to the public as far as a
water resources concern but I found I’ve
done my own research on this I have
found two historical water wells which
were drilled very deep down about three
or 400 metres into that sandstone one of
them was for a cotton spinning mill and
at Kirkham in the 19th century it had a
giant steam engine which used water
that well and in the mid 20th century
there was another deep well into that
sandstone used for a dairy and for
cheese making now I don’t believe that
either of those two wells were using
highly saline water they must have been
tapping into fresh water contrary to
what the EA would have us believe
furthermore I’ve rediscovered going to
the west of Preston new road there’s a
fault there mark just to the west which
actually had been mapped by two separate
oil industry outfits back in the 70s or
80s and all I’ve done is remap it and it
goes right up to the surface just to the
west to press a new road this could be a
conduit for water which I believe goes
all the way from east to west and out
towards the Irish Sea but some of it
could come up that fault zone and this
is really account for why there is a
little lake marked in a little blob on
the map there which is fed by four
freshwater Springs and this is another
sign that there may be fresh water
coming back up to the surface so all
that is at risk of contamination if
Cuadrilla goes ahead and Frank’s now I
want to turn to two pernicious
definitions introduced by the government
and put in without consultation into the
infrastructure Act of 2015 the Tory
government have decided that fracking is
a national infrastructure project and
that’s why they’re taking powers away
from local people and County Council’s
they are taking it all back to
Westminster and they’re overruling the
wishes of several local councils the
first definition which is specious is
that they define what is meant by
unconventional resources from
conventional resources in a different
way from the scientific convention and
the way we do this is by the
permeability of the rocks and the figure
that universally used is below a value
of naught point 1 which is the line
running down in the middle with this
diagram the stuff to the left
that’s an unconventional resource and of
course it includes shale shown by the
black area to the left very low
permeability rock over to the right
there is sandstone and limestone but
there is also things called tight
limestone’s and sandstones which are
unconventional and they need stimulation
which is either acidification or
fracking to get the oil or gas out of
them but the government has
simplistically defined in a kind of
schoolboy manner limestone and sandstone
is conventional shale is unconventional
this is going to enable companies now
operating particularly in Sussex to get
round the rules and what is meant by
unconventional or not and the second
specious definition introduced by the
government is because we’re talking
about high volume hydraulic fracturing
meaning the kind of fracking used to
break up shale what is the definition of
high volume the government has picked a
figure a very high figure ten thousand
cubic meters of water per well this is
the threshold to define it as high
volume fracking but if you look at data
published by the US Geological Survey
some of their hydrogeologists they’ve
used a huge database so this is an
empirical evidence based result of over
a quarter of a million fracked Wells in
the US as shown by that map there what
you can say just to cut a long story
short from their results is that it will
be unconventional as a gas well if
you’ve used more than two and a half
thousand cubic meters of water and for
an oil well even lower two thousand
cubic meters and above that you can say
it’s unconventional so the government’s
figure has been deliberately set in
Britain very high at ten thousand cubic
meters this will enable for example
companies in Sussex and drilling in the
Weald they may decide to frack a well
and stop at nine thousand nine hundred
cubic meters and then
say we’re not frightened because legally
this is not high volume hydraulic
fracking and this is what the Royals
allowed you that you know they’re not
fracking so we have an Orwellian
situation here of Newspeak new
definitions introduced by the Tory
government so just to round off fracking
um not only is a ton economic in the
u.s. it has never made a profit and it
certainly won’t be economic in Britain
where the costs of doing so if it ever
gets going will be far higher than the
u.s. it’s a polluting kind of industry I
think that is now well known and it
certainly doesn’t have a social license
to operate and I take my hands off to
the protesters although we should call
them protectors of the environment who
are now out there at the various
drilling sites in North Yorkshire the
East Midlands Lancashire of course and
down in the Weald in Sussex they are out
there every day trying to stop the
industry in its tracks to delay it and
obstruct it and challenge it legally and
even taking direct action I support what
they are doing and in fact in the long
run they will be doing the financial
investors a favor because eventually I
think these investors will wake up and
realize the game is not worth the candle
is never going to make any money so
we’ll pull the plug on it and this is
what I hope will happen reluctantly in
Britain and in France where I live down
in the south there was a there was a
license to frack awarded in 2009 to a
small company it was called the planes
of the longer dock license a huge
license but France had the wisdom to
cancel all the fracking licenses in 2011
so since then we have not had a problem
in our locality in France or anywhere
else for that matter
with the danger of being in a fracking
zone but recently president macro has
gone even further he announced in August
that France will no longer
no longer permit any future oil or gas
exploration . so france is really
looking forward to a future without
fossil fuels and i think this is a good
thing and of course other countries as
you’ve heard no doubt have already
banned fracking France Germany Scotland
of course Northern Ireland Republic of
Ireland Wales the state of New York the
state of Maryland Bulgaria and so on
they have all banned fracking on sound
environmental and legal reasons and I
just hope that England will be dragged
into this new era and will follow suit
sooner rather than later thank you very
much
[Applause]
[Music]
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