3/5/2023 0 Comments Uniplayer wont work![]() ![]() In 2018, an earth tremor of magnitude 1.5 at its site near Blackpool caused fracking to be halted. However, Cuadrilla quickly ran into problems, including its failure to report damage to an exploratory well, and as public awareness of fracking grew, protests started at sites and potential sites. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian The company has spent ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ in its effort to start a fracking operation. Shale rocks, containing tiny pockets of methane, are blasted with a mixture of sand, water and chemicals to create fissures through which the gas can escape, to be siphoned off at the surface.Ĭuadrilla’s chief executive, Francis Egan. But Cornelius said it was unlikely this would change and that frackers would not be given the “social licence” to operate.Ĭuadrilla, founded in 2007, was the first company to use modern hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology in the UK on dense shale rocks, first at a site in Lancashire in 2011 and carrying on until 2018. Writing in today’s Guardian, Cornelius and his former colleague, Mark Linder, who handled public affairs for Cuadrilla in its early days, said the UK was over-regulated, having “singled out the energy sector for regulations that impede operations that are standard in agriculture and other industries”. “They will never be at scale, because the capital costs are a huge issue,” he said. In the longer term, he said it was possible there could be a few localised operations, but they would be small and could not make a meaningful contribution to the UK’s energy needs. “It makes good soundbites but I can’t see anything happening,” he said. Truss’s decision to give the green light to fracking “is not going to have an impact” on the UK’s energy supply, he told the Guardian in an interview. She has said she hopes to see gas from fracked sites as soon as six months from now.īut Cornelius said that “would not happen”. Liz Truss, the prime minister, has made clear she supports fracking and will lift the moratorium that has been in place since 2019, though it remains to be seen where and how sites will be licensed. Unlike the gas-bearing shale deposits in the US, the shale resource in the UK is “heavily faulted and compartmentalised”, making it far harder to exploit at any scale. “It’s very challenging geology, compared with North America. “No sensible investors” would take the risk of embarking on large projects here, he said. ![]() He said that when Cuadrilla had operated here, it had discovered that the geology of the UK was unsuited to widespread fracking operations. “I don’t think there is any chance of fracking in the UK in the near term.” ![]()
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