Air Quality Studies Needed Near UK Shale Sites: Gov't Report

The government has released a report by its experts that calls for more UK-based studies to examine if shale gas activity impacts local air quality.

'Potential Air Quality Impacts of Shale Gas Extraction in the UK' was published by the government's Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) July 27 2018, but was reportedly presented to ministers three years ago.

"Studies in the US have shown significant impacts on both local air quality and regional ozone formation, but similar studies have not yet been undertaken for the UK," the report advises: “There is a need to substantially improve the currently available evidence base on the potential impacts at the regional and local scales."

Because scientific evidence base is still dominated by studies from the US, it recommends "that studies are undertaken to continue to extend the UK evidence base, and also evaluate the representativeness and transferability of information from the US to the UK."

Steve Billingham, CEO of air quality sensor manufacturer Duvas Technologies, commented August 17: “The AQEG’s research into the pollutant risks attached to fracking further corroborates a raft of studies into fracking sites and the wider petrochemicals industry carried out both in Europe and North America.”  He said a University of Colorado research paper published earlier this year examined the effects of long-term exposures to hazardous air pollutants for those living near to oil and gas facilities and found that the lifetime cancer risk was more than eight times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s upper risk threshold for those living within 500 feet of a well.

Duvas’ statement says the AQEG report was compiled three years ago but only published last month – a claim also made by other UK news reports. The 54-page AQEG report is available here.

Ken Cronin, CEO of UK Onshore Oil & Gas, an industry group that includes shale gas explorers, told NGW that the AQEG report "importantly notes that a number of processes have already been put in place by industry and government to monitor and publicly report emissions at our sites, which were the subject of the recommendations in the 2015 report. These processes are strictly regulated and permitted by the Environment Agency, one of our five separate regulators. The report also notes that the UK has different geology and superior regulation from the countries that data has been collected from to-date. We also have significant operational differences." Cronin also said that sites such as Cuadrilla's in Lancashire are being independently monitored for air emissions, including 12 types of gas and particulate.

Cronin also argued that increased US shale gas in the past decade has reduced its national emissions by substituting coal, and that the UK now faces an analogous opportunity to reduce emissions: by substituting imported gas produced with "higher life-cycle emissions" with UK-produced gas that comes with UK jobs and tax revenues. 

The government in recent years has faced a quandary: in order to adequately assess air quality risks near shale sites, it actually needed some shale sites; but it feared the industry could be killed off before its birth if reports were released that could be presented as alarmist by shale's opponents. The report itself, and its chief author Univ. of Leicester's Professor Paul Monks, have said that emissions near shale sites could be as much due to diesel trucks and generators operating there, rather than the actual fracking process. (That raises a question of whether some of the diesel could be switched to less-pollutive LNG)

Campaigners against shale gas development and fracking in Lancashire were aware of the AQEG work in 2016 and called for its publication, at a time when the county's planning department were deciding whether to allow Cuadrilla to drill and frack there. In the event, the UK government took the power to approve Cuadrilla's activity out of the county's hands - after the latter had refused consent - effectively curbing local democracy; on July 24 2018 it gave the final consent to fracking of a first horizontal shale gas well to Cuadrilla, which has since applied for final consent in respect of a second such well.

Duvas notes that it has recently launched a sensor that can monitor 13 species of gases, including benzene.