Four-year moratorium on shale drills set to be overturned as country initiates process to allow regulated hydraulic fracturing for shale gas

Germany has proposed a draft law that would allow commercial shale gas fracking at depths of over 3,000 metres, overturning a de facto moratorium that has been in place since the start of the decade.

A new six-person expert panel would also be empowered to allow fracks at shallower levels

Shale gas industry groups welcomed the proposal for its potential to crack open the German shale gas market, but it has sparked outrage among environmentalists who view it as the thin edge of a fossil fuel wedge.

Senior German officials say that the proposal, first mooted in July, is an environmental protection measure, wholly unrelated to energy security concerns which have been intensified by the conflict in Ukraine.

“It is important to have a legal framework for hydraulic fracturing as until now there has been no legislation on the subject,” Maria Krautzberger, president of Germany’s federal environment agency (UBA), told the Guardian.

“We have had a voluntary agreement with the big companies that there would be no fracking but if a company like Exxon wanted, they might do it anyway as there is no way to forbid it,” she said. “This is a progressive step forward.”

The draft law would only affect hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and tight gas in water protection and spring healing zones.

The tight gas industry made up around 3% of German gas production before the moratorium, and, under the new proposals, could resume fracking in the Lower Saxony region where it is concentrated.

Commercial fracking for shale gas and coal bed methane would be banned at levels below 3,000 metres, but allowed for exploration purposes at shallower levels, subject to the assessment of the expert panel.

Environmentalists, however, were alarmed that half of the experts belong to institutions that signed the Hanover Declaration, calling for increased exploration of shale gas in Germany as a way of increasing energy security.

“It is clear what these people are going to say,” José Bové, the French Green MEP, told the Guardian. “The panel is not going to be independent, but exactly what the companies are looking for. You don’t need a panel to tell you that shale gas is dangerous. We can see the problems with water pollution, earthquakes and methane emissions. We need people to protest about it before the exploration begins.”

Germany is estimated to have 2.3tn cubic metres of shale gas reserves and industry groups say that its exploitation can help ease the country’s energiewende transition away from coal, oil and nuclear energy, and assuage fears about the disruption of Russian gas supplies.

“The reality is that Germany needs to ensure security of supply,” said Marcus Pepperell, a spokesman for Shale Gas Europe. “That is what is driving the debate, and this is a pragmatic approach that allows Germany to respond to its energy requirements by exploring shale gas reserves with fracking.”

The proposed law is just beginning its legislative passage and could still change in intergovernmental and parliamentary discussions, before a plenary vote in the Bundestag in May.

If passed into law, the expert panel should be set up in 2018, and the following year could see the first fracking in Germany since 2011.

Officials insisted that this would be on a small scale that would not challenge the central rationale of the energiewende – to increase renewable energy supplies.

“We are on the side of the environmentalists,” Krautzberger said. “Their goals are our goals but we say we should not close the door on a technology that might be fruitful in the future for exploring geothermal and other energies that do not harm the environment.”

UBA believes that currently expensive technologies to frack using warm air and warm water could one day unlock new energy extraction possibilities.

“We are in a typical ‘sandwich position’ [between industry and environmental lobbies] but we think it’s very unlikely that shale gas fracking will be developed in Germany and we say that there is no need for it as our future is in renewables,” Krautzberger said.