Fracking inquiry launched after Blackpool tremors

Scientists will investigate how fracking can affect drinking water and its role in earthquake tremors of the kind caused by shale gas operations near Blackpool, as part of a taxpayer-funded £8m research project.

The programme, backed by the Natural Environment Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council, will examine hydraulic fracturing’s environmental impacts on land, water and air, as well as public attitudes to the controversial extraction technique.

The funding green light comes as a key shale firm submitted its official plan for minimising the risks of any seismic activity caused by its planned fracking operations in North Yorkshire.

The hydraulic fracture plan by Third Energy is the first of its kind under a strengthened regulatory regime for fracking, imposed in the wake of two small Blackpool earthquakes in 2011.

The Environment Agency said complying with the rules would be crucial for frackers to win back public trust.

Official polls have shown support for extracting shale gas is at record lows, and Lancashire county council rejected a fracking bid by Cuadrilla before the decision was later overturned by the government.

Mark Ellis-Jones, the EA’s onshore oil and gas programme project executive, said: “For the industry, compliance with their environmental permits is probably the single most important thing they will need to do, to demonstrate to local communities and us, the regulator, that the operations they are proposing are safe for people and the environment.

“This will be key for regaining trust and the social licence for the communities in which they operate.”

The industry was finally “on the brink of becoming operational in this country”, he added.

Cuadrilla is preparing to drill later this summer at its Preston New Road site in the Fylde, Lancashire, which has faced protests since January including local councillors blocking the site on Monday.

The EA said it had visited the site five times already, in a sign of how seriously it was taking regulation of the embryonic sector.

Third Energy has permission to frack in Kirby Misperton in North Yorkshire, which is expected to take place by the end of 2017. Elsewhere, iGas said this week that it hopes to drill two wells in Nottinghamshire during the last three months of the year, though it does not yet have permission for fracking.

But one of iGas’s top executives said that the 12- and 18-month delays the firm had experienced in the planning process were not sustainable if the UK was to reap the economic benefits from shale.

“That is not ultimately a sustainable way if the country decides that shale gas can provide benefits in terms of security of supply, jobs, growth etc, and be done safely and be done environmentally responsibly,” said John Blaymires, the iGas chief operating officer.

However, while the industry appears to be on the verge of ramping up after years of delay, experts sounded a note of caution over just how much gas might be recovered by fracking in Britain.

Professor Michael Stephenson, director of science and technology at the British Geological Survey, which has undertaken four major surveys of the shale resource, said there appeared to be key differences between shale in the UK and in the US, where fracking first took off.

“It’s a little bit more terrestrial in origin, so it has more woody material rather than planktonic, marine material. That means probably it’s a bit less capable of yielding a lot of gas. It [the gas] is there but what we’ve found through recent studies in the last two years is it’s quite confined to layers within the shale,” he said.

Only after the first shale wells have been drilled would it become clear how much gas could be recovered, Stephenson said.