Where’s the Shale?

Hasn’t Shale had a bad press? Of course FoE, WWF and the other Greens have been pushing the PR hard and the result is a great deal of dis-information. What amazes me is that these organsations support wind with it’s millions of tone of concrete, damage to thousand of sq. kilometres of peat beds, destruction of forests, miles of roads across our natural environment and damage to watercourses, let alone the visual impact on our natural environment, the use of rare earth minerals and the thousands of tons of steel and non recylable fibreglass. I think this proves a greater political motivation than environmental one. Contrary to our belief on-shore oil and gas drilling in the UK has been going on for years. The most famous is the Wytch Oil Field but it is far from the only one. Unconventional gas is also well explored(no pun intended) mostly in coal bed methane and methane from waste sites. Quite a large amount of mostly un-metered energy is produced already from small scale generation as heat and energy systems. However Shale Gas could well be a game changer and the supporters of wind are rattled. The gravy train may well be coming to the end of the line. So where is Shale Gas and will it impact on me? Firstly discount the harbingers of doom. As previously posted, gas exploration can be virtually invisible. Earthquakes are no worse than we suffer any day in the UK and may well not even happen. Flames shooting from taps is a spin and actually is caused by coal bed methane getting into groundwater. It has nothing to go with shale gas at 8000ft below our feet. Water used in fracking is a manageable entity and assuming good governance and professional practice should never be an issue. One hundred days of medium disruption for forty years of cheap energy. The Caveat is that it must be well regulated and I don’t mean over regulated. We already have a mines inspectorate and a great deal of experience in the Health and Safety Inspectorate and the Royal Geological Survey to properly oversee this technology. For the sake of all mankind keep it away from the Department of Energy and Climate Change! Their incompetence is legend. So here are two maps. The top one shows the overall areas where shale gas may be present and the one below, a more detailed copy, not only shows the elements of potentially gas bearing sediments but also the level of existing oil/gas drilling prior to the Shale Gas bubble. The wealth and health of this country  relies on affordable energy. Intermittency of renewables pushes costs above the affordable.  The future is probably a nuclear one using either thorium or fusion technology. Fusion is still some time away although when one considers the rise of the mobile phone, time scales can be concentrated in surprising ways. Until then we need energy and renewables have singularly failed to produce an economical, reliable, non intrusive method of powering the UK. All they have done is driven a wedge straight down the middle of our people, fuelled by pure and unadulterated greed and stoked by the watermelon politics of the environmental movements. The Fracking Myths exposed