Cuadrilla, the privately owned shale gas explorer, should be allowed to “frack” up to four wells in the Lancashire countryside near Blackpool, a planning officers’ report recommended recently.
It could mean the resumption of the first such controversial drilling programme in four years.
Cuadrilla had to stop drilling in 2011 after two small earthquakes in the area.
County councillors are deliberating, as I write, on whether to nod the application through amid a mob of protesters outside the council’s offices.
If passed, it could mark the start of a replication of the so-called “shale revolution” that has seen the US become the world’s largest oil producer.
Lower gas prices, meanwhile, have led to a renaissance in industrial investment and job creation.
But a fracking campaign in Lancashire could also lead to a lot more and possibly violent protests similar to those seen in West Sussex in 2013.
Thousands of people sought to disrupt drilling and “fracking” in Balcombe for what they thought was a gas well.
Such is the confusion that exists about “fracking”, however, that Balcombe was, in fact, an oil well that Cuadrilla had to drill under the licence terms.
It said, however, there was no intention to “frack" at that time.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracture stimulation to give it its proper name, involves pumping water and chemicals underground to fracture shale rock and release tightly held gas and oil.
The process is not a new one, but It was only in 2004 that it was established as commercially viable.
Since then fracking has indeed released vast amounts of, at first, gas, and more recently oil in the US previously thought inaccessible.
But the “shale revolutions” have not been repeated, so far, in Argentina, China, Poland, India and the UK, all of which are known to have substantial resources of shale.
As many readers will know the Prime Minister David Cameron and many of his Conservative Party colleagues in the previous coalition government felt that shale oil and gas is their “get out of jail card free” card in that it would remedy the government’s chaotic energy policy.
Nothing seems to have changed now that the Tories has an overall majority in Parliament and no Liberal Democrats in government to worry about.
Early in 2014 the British Geological Society, with the enthusiastic backing of the government, said there could be over 1,300trn cubic feet of shale gas in the Bowland Basin stretching across Lancashire and other counties in northern England.
This raised eyebrows in many quarters since it seemed completely over the top.
The Financial Times commented: “Estimates are high – but probably too high.”
"The British Geological Survey’s estimate of just one formation, the Bowland-Hodder, is 1,329 trillion cubic feet (TCF). Note that all of the gas produced in the UK since 1973 comes to 85TCF”.
One tenth of this estimate would equate to more than 40 years' supply for the UK.
Current consumption in the UK was around 3TCF a year, early in 2014.
The problem is that the 1,300 TCF estimate is for “gas-in-place”, which is vastly different from what is recoverable.
Even in the US recovery rates have been rarely higher than 10%, although they have been improving in the past couple of years.
Depletion is rapid. Old and knowledgeable geologists from the US have been telling any oil journalist that would listen for some time that the geology in the UK is different to the US.
It is one thing to drill horizontally under the flat plains in Texas and quite another to drill 5,000 feet down under the Pennines or the South Downs where the so-called “laterals” can be heavily faulted.
This means to say you can be drilling horizontally and suddenly run to an underground mountain range like the Annapurna.
In other words, it is possible there might not be quite the same amounts of gas to found relatively speaking in the UK as there has been in the US.
Francis Cugen the non-executive chairman of IGas, one of the few UK publicly-quoted companies with exposure to acreage with shale gas potential, said: “Nobody really knows how much gas or oil is there until you actually drill”.
So far there have only been three wells drilled in the UK by Cuadrilla: two in Lancashire and the one in Balcombe. They were encouraging but not conclusive.
But despite some doubts in some peoples’ minds that there will a US-scale shale bonanza in the UK, the Cameron-led governments continue to believe there is enough shale gas to supply the UK’s energy needs for the next four decades.
Following the Bowland survey, there was feverish activity in the shale space.
Total, the French major farmed into UK permits to the tune of £45mln, and there has been consolidation among the small caps with potential shale reserves.
IGas has bought out the smaller ASX-listed Dart Energy in an all share deal.
Egdon Resources, which is focused on conventional drilling onshore the UK, invested in licences from coal mine methane (CMM) producer Alkane Energy in an all share deal.
The AIM-listed Egdon (LON:EDR) and IGas (LON:IGAS) have or will have more than 60% of northern England’s key shale acreage. All this followed the participation of Centrica (LON:CNA) with Cuadrilla last summer.
The governments in the UK have talked about and start to implement a raft of measures to facilitate the exploitation of shale.
The government has said it would bring in measures to allow fracking companies to access land deemed suitable without landowners consent.
George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has said the government will introduce a new field allowance for shale gas and extend the Ring Fence Expenditure Supplement for shale gas projects to 10 from six years.
At the same time, the government has proposed to compensate local authorities and communities by returning up to 1% of revenues from shale operations to them.
Opponents of shale are not just worried about earthquakes. They are concerned chemicals pumped into wells might contaminate the water table.
They feel troubled that shale gas might escape into the atmosphere. Shale gas is methane and this has 23 times the potency of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
There will inevitably be protests and could retard shale developments in the UK.
But there is another reason why progress could be slow. That is the question of title.
In the US, the people who own the land also own what is underneath it.
In the UK, the Queen owns the underneath. This means in practice the local councils decide what goes ahead. They can be notoriously indecisive when it comes to planning.
This more than anything could mean the UK shale “revolution” could be a long time coming.