Shale Gas in Blackpool: An 'Inconvenient Surprise'

Why won't Huhne celebrate our gas windfall?

In his opinion piece for The Independent, Domenic Lawson, former editor of The Specator magazine and the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, writes that Cuadrilla Resource's recent discovery of shale gas near to Blackpool offers the United Kingdom, "the prospect of cheap, secure energy for decades, if not centuries."

However, Chris Huhne, the UK's Energy Secretary, "seems determined not to draw the public's attention to a very recent discovery of no less significance or potential." 

Lawson says the uncharacteristicly reticent behavoir by Huhne is due to the fact that he is also Cabinet minister responsible for Climate Change policy and that the shale gas find comes as a most inconvenient surprise to him in that capacity.

Huhne actually purrs when the price of fossil fuel rises, because it makes the prodigious per kilowatt costs of wind and solar power seem less extortionate and more competitive. He has also argued that our national security rests on developing indigenous sources of energy (such as wind), and that we ought not to be over reliant on gas from Russia and Iran. The shale gas find addresses his security argument with primordial force.

Lawson says that the UK's carbon-reduction plan based on hugely expensive "renewable" energy is on life-support and will soon have the plug pulled.

As for carbon emissions, the Oxford University professor Dieter Helm (a specialist in energy and the environment) pointed out last week that: "At the global level, the reason why Kyoto has made so little difference is that coal is the rising fuel. Switching from coal to gas is cheap – and it cuts emissions by almost half... it gets emissions down much faster and cheaper than all those offshore wind farms in the short to medium term."

He points to figures from the US Energy Department, which calculated the cost per megawatt hour for newly installed electricity generating capacity. Conventional gas averaged at 66 cents per megawatt hour, while offshore wind farms came in almost four times more expensive at $2.43 per megawatt hour. The respective British figures were 60p a megawatt hour for gas and 150p per megawatt hour for wind.

Lawson surmises that no European country has any intention of signing a mandatory carbon reduction treaty.  Days are numbered for subsidised wind-power experiments he says, pointing to the writing on the wall in a leaked draft of the EU's Energy Roadmap 2050.

"If co-ordinated action on climate among the main global players fails to strengthen in the next few years, the question arises how far the EU should continue with an energy-system transition oriented to de-carbonisation."

Read the Full Opinion Piece at The Independent HERE