I will admit that this story gave me rather a giggle. Centrica is to buy into the Cuadrilla shale gas operation in the North West of England. The giggle comes from the fact that the operations Centrica will be buying into are the ones that they drilled and declared valueless a couple of decades back:

A little history is necessary to understand this. Centrica has grown out of the prospecting arm of the old British Gas. British Gas used to own the rights to the Bowland Shale and indeed they drilled it back awhile. They then declared that there was no economic gas available there and abandoned the project. What Cuadrilla has essentially done is come back into the same field (and I believe it’s even the same well) and drilled again using more modern fracking technology. The estimates of the recoverable gas down there are now vast: we’re talking a decade to three of the entire country’s gas supplies from this one field.

Which is where the giggle comes in: Centrica is now going to be paying heavily for access to something that it used to own.