Platts: Who’s betting on UK shale gas? Cuadrilla, and maybe somebody big

Who’s betting on UK shale gas…and who’s betting against it? Right now there’s a dramatic gulf between pessimistic statements at last week’s World Energy Forum meeting in Davos that UK shale gas is no great game changer, and the fact that the next few days might witness an energy major farming in to the one company that intends to revolutionise UK gas production.

To start with the pessimism, if only to err on the side of caution. At Davos on Thursday, Centrica CEO Sam Laidlaw, one of Britain’s biggest gas chiefs, was quoted as saying that said it would be at least a decade before the UK saw any shale gas production and that, even then, it would not be “the game changer we’ve seen in North America”.

But on Friday, a source close to Cuadrilla, which says it has some 200 trillion cubic feet (about 5.7 trillion cubic metres) of gas-in-place in its section of the Bowland Shale Group, told this blogger: “They are dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s” on a farm-in agreement with an energy major.”   MORE