The owner of the shale fracking company Cuadrilla will permanently plug and abandon its two shale wells in Lancashire, drawing a line on Britain’s failed fracking industry.
Cuadrilla set out plans to permanently seal the two shale gas wells drilled at the Preston New Road Lancashire shale exploration site a little over two years after the government brought an end to fracking in England.
Francis Egan, the chief executive of Cuadrilla, said the government’s oil and gas regulator had ordered the “ridiculous” shutdown of the wells in the northern Bowland Shale gas formation despite Europe’s gas supply crisis.
“At a time when the UK is spending billions of pounds annually importing gas from all corners of the globe, and gas prices for hard-pressed UK households are rocketing, the UK government has chosen this moment to ask us to plug and abandon the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain,” Egan said.
The UK’s failed shale industry has consistently argued that fracking could help to secure gas supplies, but the claims have been disputed by leading industry experts who have said shale gas would not help to lower UK energy bills.
The Guardian understands that the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) originally called for the wells to be shut down last summer, and gave Cuadrilla until June this year to complete the work.
Cuadrilla’s attack on the government’s stance against fracking has won support from two members of the Conservative Net Zero Scrutiny Group, which has recently begun what critics say is a “cynical” campaign against policies designed to end the UK’s contribution to the climate crisis.
The Tory MP Craig Mackinlay, the chair of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, described the shutdown of the redundant wells as “madness” and Steve Baker, the group’s deputy chair, said the decision would “make the situation even worse” for households struggling with energy bills.
“We heard the same story a decade ago,” said Greenpeace UK’s head of climate, Kate Blagojevic. “Fracking was going to be the solution to our energy problems. Years later, all this industry has given us are a couple of holes in a muddy field and some minor earthquakes.”
The government brought in a de facto ban on fracking in late 2019 after years of bitter opposition from climate campaigners and local protest groups as a study by the industry regulator warned the practice could not be carried out safely without the risk of triggering earth tremors.
“Even shale advocates were forced to concede that fracking wasn’t going to lower energy bills, and that remains true for both shale gas and new gas from the North Sea. It will take many years to develop and if it gets produced at all, it will be sold to the highest bidder on the international market, barely making a dent on global gas prices. The solution to the energy crisis isn’t more gas, but better, greener homes,” Blagojevic said.
Sam Hall, the director of the Conservative Environment Network, said the UK’s fracking industry had failed to “win communities’ support or frack without causing tremors”, even after the government “expended significant political capital and taxpayers’ money trying to kickstart fracking in the UK”.
Fracked gas had “limited potential to reduce energy bills”, he said, and the government was “right to focus on expanding domestic clean energy and reducing gas demand as the route out of the current energy bill crisis”.
The OGA’s rules state that only wells “which have real value” are allowed to be left suspended “rather than immediately decommissioned”. A spokesperson for the OGA said it expected a “timely plugging and abandonment of non-producing wells” under its rules, which ensure that “redundant” wells are managed responsibly.
