New UK Research Facility 'May Study Fracking'
The British Geological Survey (BGS) announced September 26 that a new observatory costing £31mn ($42mn) that will serve as “the UK’s eyes and ears for the underground” is to be located at the Ince Marshes area in North Cheshire, in northwest England.
BGS said the Cheshire Energy Research Field Site "will advance our understanding of the technologies and science needed for carbon storage, energy storage, underground storage of waste material and shale gas.”
Anti-fracking campaigners, while respecting BGS' independence, argue the publicly-funded facility will be used to justify shale drilling in the area – where firms such as Ineos and IGas have exploration acreage, though as yet no fracking permits. The campaigners want shale left undisturbed, arguing its exploitation will add to climate change. Consultancy Wood Mackenzie however recently pointed out that the carbon intensity of LNG production, some of which comes to Europe, is far higher than shale gas production.
BGS acknowledges that some research conducted at the Cheshire site will look at how shale gas behaves in the ground. It said its funding body, the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, will not be commissioning any shale gas fracking but that, if licences are granted for others to extract gas in the area, then BGS would use the facility to monitor the effects and that all data would be available to all: “The observatory will enable valuable science whether fracking is happening or not.”
BGS executive director John Ludden said the new facility “is also located at the very heart of Cheshire's Energy Hub – with the wind farm, refinery, energy research centre, mixed-use energy development and the hydrogen cluster as neighbours.
"We need the subsurface environment to develop a mix of low-carbon energy technologies at the required scale – whether that's for carbon storage, energy storage, geothermal energy, hydrogen production or lower-carbon energy sources. It is vital that we build the best-possible geological evidence base to be able to optimise the process without an adverse impact on the environment," he added.
Creating the Cheshire Energy Research Field Site will involve the BGS drilling some 80 observation boreholes of various depths in a 28 km2 area around Ince Marshes. The network of boreholes has been designed to enable UK geoscientists and geoengineers to study geology in unprecedented detail, to observe how fluids and gas flow within underground systems and to understand the relationship between the rock layers: from the surface to the deep underground environment.
Separately, the UK government said September 26 that a new 45-acre solar energy unit in Bedfordshire, near London, will be the UK's first to be built and operated without government subsidy, following a fall in the cost of solar panels by two thirds since 2010. National Grid said the same day that more than half the UK’s electricity came from low carbon sources from June 21 to September 22, making it the ‘greenest’ summer on record. Almost 52% was met by low carbon sources, compared to around 35% four years ago, it said, without spelling out how much was imported French nuclear electricity.
Mark Smedley