PRIME Minister Liz Truss could not even say where the fracking she has legalised is to take place in a series of car crash interviews with BBC radio stations on Thursday morning.
Truss had been silent for five days after her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a “mini-budget” which plunged the UK into economic crisis.
Pressure, both international and domestic, piled on the Tory government to change course after their tax cuts for the rich funded by increased borrowing led to the collapse of the pound.
Breaking her silence, Truss spoke in a series of interviews with local BBC radio stations across England. There were no appearances on any stations in the devolved nations.
Being questioned by BBC Lancashire’s Graham Liver, the Prime Minister stumbled when confronted over her plans to break a Tory manifesto pledge and lift the ban on fracking.
On September 8 – the day Queen Elizabeth died – Truss told MPs: “We will end the moratorium on extracting our huge reserves of shale, which could get gas flowing as soon as six months from now where there is local support for it.”
Asked what this “local support” would look like, Truss was unable to say. She responded: “Well, I, the, the Energy Secretary [Jacob Rees-Mogg] will be laying out, in more detail, exactly what that looks like, but it does mean making sure there is local support for going ahead.”
Liz Truss crumbles under questioning from @GrahamLiver on @BBCLancashire about local consent for fracking. pic.twitter.com/nDp2t5815P
— Dino Sofos (@dinosofos) September 29, 2022
Told that the local Tory MPs and local county council did not want fracking, and that the science had not changed, Truss was asked why she couldn’t say there would be no further shale gas fracking in Lancashire.
“I don’t accept the premise of your question,” she responded. Asked why, the Prime Minister said: “Because what I’ve said is if there is local consent we will go ahead.
“We need to explore where there is local consent and where there isn’t. We’re still doing that work. I don’t think we should rule out the whole of Lancashire.”
BBC host Liver then said: “You talked about how [fracking] is a success in other countries, but in America they do it in the middle of nowhere. Do you actually know where Preston New Road is, where they have been fracking?”
Truss was unable to respond, except to say she had not visited the site.
That is despite the fact that the Preston New Road site – which is run by the shale gas exploration company Cuadrilla – is looking to frack the “Bowland Shale”, the area the British Geological Survey calls “the main rock formation of interest for shale gas exploration in the UK”.
Further, as Cuadrilla's website states: "The UK’s first ever horizontal shale gas exploration well [was] drilled through the shale rock more than 7500 feet beneath the Preston New Road."
The site (above), located at Little Plumpton, is just five miles outside both Blackpool and the popular tourist town of Lytham St Annes.
Asked if she should visit the site, Truss took a painful five seconds to answer. She then repeated that she would “make sure” local consent was in place before moving ahead with fracking.
Earlier in September, Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh, said that Truss’s lifting of the ban on fracking was “not an act based on data but on desperation and dogma”.
Writing for the Conservation, Professor Haszeldine said that comparisons to North America did not hold water. “If the UK wants to develop a major US-style fracking industry, it is 280 million years too late,” he said.
"There simply isn’t enough gas," Haszeldine added, saying that despite government-commissioned reports which predicted that many tens of years worth of gas supply may exist below UK soil, “usually, after more detailed work, the commercially viable reserves are no more than 10% of the original estimate”.
In 2019, Will Meredith and Colin Snape, two energy experts from the University of Nottingham, looked into the reality of government estimates on the amount of gas that could be extracted from The Bowland – the UK’s “largest and most economically viable shale”.
They wrote: “The 2013 [UK Government] study estimated that Bowland shale alone could provide the UK with up to 50 years of gas at current demand. But it turns out this was a big over-estimate … “We estimate that the maximum reserves for the Bowland Shale are around 200 standard trillion cubic feet – that’s less than a sixth of the 2013 estimate of around 1300 trillion cubic ft.
“Assuming 10% of the reserves are economically recoverable – a fairly optimistic scenario – this corresponds to no more than ten years’ UK gas supply at current demand.”
