The Telegraph: Time to tear up the silly rules holding back the UK’s fracking revolution
Whenever a double-decker bus goes up my street, a very frequent occurrence, my house shakes and rattles. The street has been a busy bus route since anybody can remember, I am told by neighbours who have lived in the area since the 1940s, and yet the house - a sturdy Victorian structure - still stands. We all moan, of course, but nobody in their right mind would describe the vibrations as an earthquake.
Yet, while buses are rightly allowed to inflict this sort of impact on residential communities – there isn’t really any way to get around it – the fracking industry is held to far stricter standards. Any energy firm that caused those sorts of tremors would immediately be accused of triggering a full-blown ’quake and shut down. In fact, the current rules imposed on the industry are equivalent to banning the slamming of wooden doors, according to a remarkable study by Dr Rob Westaway and Prof Paul Younger, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Engineering.
Tremors above 0.5 on the Richter scale are actually quite easy to engineer but, while we live with them in ordinary life, we don’t tolerate them when it comes to shale. The gross political over-reaction happened a few years ago when Cuadrilla caused two earth tremors measuring 1.5 and 2.3 on the Richter scale while fracking near Blackpool. Yet anything below 3 isn’t usually even felt on the surface and only those above magnitude 4 are regarded as “significant”. There is very little chance that fracking would ever cause anything worse than 3.6, an impact which might just about crack some plaster.