Letter From the UK

Ignorant Luddites and Their Greek-Chorus Government

On extracting gas from rock, or putting it in there, the greens are equally confused  
The push for 'carbon capture' and the row over 'fracking' are both misguided. 

Christopher Booker  
The Telegraph

A delightful parable unfolded last week over the scarcely believable shambles we are making of our national energy policy. Ever more people are waking up to the fact that “renewables” such as windmills are absurdly expensive and hopelessly inefficient. Meanwhile, our nuclear plans have been thrown into disarray, our North Sea gas is fast running out, and we have turned our back on coal, even though it still often provides us with half our electricity. So how will we keep the lights on?

There were headline stories last week from two areas of energy policy that highlighted our predicament.
First there was the Government’s grudging go-ahead to the exploitation of Britain’s vast shale gas reserves, prompting a vehement reaction from all the usual suspects, led by green groups, the BBC and The Guardian. Then there was a report criticising the Government for not pressing ahead with its drive to spend billions of pounds on developing a workable form of “carbon capture and storage” – a system whereby fossil-fuel power stations could be tolerated, if the CO2 they emit is piped away and buried in holes beneath the North Sea.

There is a curious parallel between these two stories. The shale gas which could potentially provide Britain with cheap energy for hundreds of years (and has already halved the price of gas in the US), is extracted by injecting water and chemicals to fracture rocks thousands of feet below the ground (hence the term “fracking”). This allows the gas to escape, to be piped back up to the surface. The Government’s permission for this to be done in Britain promoted hysteria from the greenies, who warned that it could cause “earthquakes” and cited a film, Gasland, made by an American green activist. The film claims that methane from fracking can get into groundwater (way above where the gas is embedded in the rock) and shows someone setting light to the water coming from a kitchen tap.

The Today programme did at least interview a geologist who explained that the tiny earth tremors associated with fracking were no larger than the 16 a year which used to be caused by coal mining. But it was much more at home with Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth, who claimed that shale gas would be a major contributor to global warming and inevitably mentioned Gasland. The BBC clearly didn’t realise that this film has long since been exposed as no more than silly propaganda. The methane emerging from the tap has nothing to do with fracking but has been known as an entirely natural phenomenon in certain parts of America for more than 70 years.

How strange, though, that the same greenies who are dead set against fracking are so obsessed with “carbon capture”, which relies on a very similar principle in reverse – collecting gas from the surface and injecting it at very high pressure into the rocks below. Scientific studies have shown that, on the scale needed to bury the hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 given off by Britain’s power stations, injecting it like this would fracture the rock so badly that it would soon make further injection impossible.

Carbon capture on a commercial scale would not only be a horrendously expensive pursuit, but is actually no more than a pipe-dream, worthy of Swift’s Academy of Lagado, like extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Yet, when Ed Miliband, as energy and climate change minister, proposed that we should spend £4 billion on trying to make it work, the only riposte from the Tories was to suggest that no more fossil-fuel power stations should be allowed until the experiment was successful.

So the greens abhor one type of rock-fracturing, which could provide us with almost limitless supplies of cheap energy, while calling for a similar procedure in reverse, which in practice cannot possibly work.