Displaying items by tag: Lancashire

Fracking company Cuadrilla has requested an urgent review of existing earthquake safety levels, hoping that the permission to generate larger tremors will allow them to extract greater quantities of shale gas from Lancashire. Currently they must suspend drilling when quakes measuring over 0.5 magnitude are detected. Although numerous legal challenges and protests were not enough to prevent the company from beginning exploratory drilling at Preston last year, it is now the government’s ‘traffic light system’ for seismic activity which the industry appears to consider the greatest threat to its survival. There is a ‘rich reservoir of recoverable high quality natural gas present’, but the seismic operating limit remains a barrier to developing its potential. David Attenborough and others believe that the Government should stop wasting time on this polluting industry and back the clean energy infrastructure needed to tackle climate change.

Fracking for shale gas has begun for the first time in the UK since it was linked with earthquakes in 2011. Energy firm Cuadrilla confirmed that the controversial process had started at its site in Lancashire after a legal challenge failed. Cuadrilla insisted the process was safe and would be of ‘enormous’ benefit, leading to tens of thousands of jobs if successful. After at least three months fracking two horizontal wells, they will then test to see if the gas flow is commercially viable. If it is, up to 20 wells could be built. Protesters call it a toxic industry and an environmental disaster. Cat Smith, Labour MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, tweeted, ‘Future generations will look back at this and wonder why we didn't heed climate change warnings’. Many believe the process of hydraulic fracturing of the earth’s crust in the UK is taking an enormous risk of triggering earthquakes.