Shale Opponents Accused of Misrepresenting Risks

The Sunday Telegraph reports that many arguments against shale gas development are being exposed as misrepresentations.

Frack Off, the British campaign group, says fracking is a “new method” that is being “pioneered” and “trialled” by Cuadrilla. It says that the shale gas exploration in Lancashire is “Britain’s first fracking project”.

In fact, fracking is not new and has been used without previous controversy since the 1940s. A spokesman for Cuadrilla said that an existing gas well at Elswick, near one of its sites in Lancashire, was fracked 20 years ago by its then owners, British Gas, in “almost exactly the same way” as at Cuadrilla’s shale sites now.

The Elswick site has been producing conventional gas without controversy since 1996. The spokesman accused Frack Off of using “misleading information” to scare people. .

In the United States, hydraulic fracturing has been commercially undertaken for over sixty years. Over one million gas wells have been ''fracked' without a single incident of environmental impact. 

At a recent conference held in Houston, Scott Anderson, Senior Policy Advisor for Environmental Defense Fund’s Energy Program, said that there had been no proven instances where hydraulic fracturing had polluted ground water.

In Europe, hydraulic fracturing has been occuring in Germany since 1955 in the Schleswig-Holstein region and since 1976 in the country’s Lower Saxony region. ExxonMobil has conducting fracking at it Damme 3 well site since 2008 and RWE Dea, the exploration arm of the German utility, says that it has been using fracking technology for many years without any negative impact on the environment.