UK Planning Laws May Impede Shale Gas Development
Speaking before members of the Energy and Climate Change Committee inquiry into shale gas. Energy Minister Charles Hendry said that present planning laws could stand in the way of shale gas development.
“Some of it is under very heavily populated areas of the country [and] there has to be approval given from people whose land is being drilled underneath and this could make things much more complicated,” he said.
The issue of land ownership in terms of drilling for shale gas in the UK will be ‘critical’, the Energy Minister says, and that individual landowners would need to give consent.
The meeting heard shale had the potential to become a 'game-changer' in world energy markets - having already transformed the US from a major importer to an exporter of gas.
However, Hendry inferred that shale gas in the UK would not be a ‘game changer’ in the same way as the US, or expected to have the same impact on prices, because of the flexibility of the UK market and the different sources of gas.
“Shale gas is not essentially a new technology; it’s a new strata using an existing technology.”
Committee Chair Tim Yeo told Hendry that a lack of transparency was 'retarding rather than advancing' the cause of shale gas.
The committee was angered that Department of Energy and Climate Change had carried out a behind closed doors investigation into shale without informing it.
Mr. Yeo said: "The suspicion in the United States of the environmental impacts of shale gas has been greatly increased by the reluctance of the companies and, in some cases the regulators, to disclose to the public what's actually happening."
Mr. Hendry, who apologized for not telling the committee, said: "I think if people see there are things going on behind closed doors, which they can't understand and don't know about they become suspicious often without warrant."
Asked whether the UK should take the lead on establishing Europe wide regulations on drilling for shale, Hendry replied that while the EU could be useful in terms of sharing information and making sure that best practice was understood for shale gas, he was not persuaded about a common European standard.
“My nervousness about common standards is they sometimes end up being the lowest common denominator.”
He also dismissed concerns other countries, for instance Poland, would exploit lower levels of regulation to get ahead of the UK on shale, claiming the population there were as concerned as in Britain about environmental impacts.
Written submissions by presenters to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee can be accessed HERE
Source: EDIE