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Premier Philippe Couillard closed the door on shale gas development in Quebec after an environmental review said its risks outweighed the economic benefits.

“I don’t think there is a big interest in developing this resource on the economic or financial levels. Anyway, the social acceptability isn’t there,” he said in an exclusive interview with Radio-Canada on Tuesday.

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“If there’s no segment of the population that approves of the practice then I don’t see the interest in developing it.”

Couillard stopped short of calling for an extended ban on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which involves blasting a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals into the ground at very high pressure to break up rock formations and extract natural gas or oil.

Last year, the Parti Québécois government imposed a five-year ban on fracking in the St. Lawrence Lowlands, the region between Montreal and Quebec City, home to about 2 million people. But the PQ government was later criticized for offering two energy companies $115 million to carry out exploratory studies on Anticosti Island as a prelude to hydraulic fracturing for oil.