Mr. Austin flirted with bringing in an equity partner last year to pay for the new wells. Instead, IGas raised £23 million in new equity this year and also floated a $165 million bond in Oslo this month.

After drilling two wells and fracking at least one, the company will look for a partner to bring capital and expertise, Mr. Blaymires says. He conceded that the shale gas quest “has proven a little more difficult” than he envisaged when he joined in 2010. “There’s nothing I have seen to date that says this can’t work,” he said. “We have to get some wells drilled and fracked to demonstrate that it is commercially practical.”

Mr. Austin and Mr. Blaymires say they think they may have a way of overcoming environmental concerns. They say that the British shale formations appear to be 3,000 to 4,000 feet, or 915 to 1,220 meters, thick — several times as thick as those found in the United States. Because of the presumed greater production of the formations, the executives say they hope to be able to drill many wells from a single site so as to reduce the environmental impact above ground. Hydraulic fracturing involves drilling down vertically, and then horizontally, creating fissures into which a combination of water and chemicals is pumped to force the gas from the rock. Mr. Blaymires said a single site could extract gas from an underground formation of four or five square miles, or 10 to 13 square kilometers.

The back-of-the-envelope economics look encouraging. A site with 10 wells, each with four lateral branches, might produce gas worth more than $1 billion at today’s prices during its lifetime, according to a study by the Institute of Directors, a British business group. But to bring in sand, water and equipment for fracking might, over 20 years, require as many as 31,000 truck visits to the site, the group estimates. The prospect of big rumbling trucks rolling through their communities is one of the reasons local people oppose oil and gas development.

Winning over local skeptics may not be easy.

Treading carefully as it parses its descriptions of what it is up to in Barton, IGas says on its Web site, “We are not hydraulically fracturing but just taking samples for analysis,” even though the company does indeed hope to frack the well.

The Salford city government, which has jurisdiction over the Barton site, so far is under the impression that IGas is looking for coal bed methane, not shale gas.

“What will begin soon, undertaken by IGas, is coal-bed methane exploration drilling. There is no permission for ‘fracking’ in Salford,” Ian Stewart, the mayor of the city of Salford, wrote in an e-mail. “Should the company or anyone else wish in the future to engage in ‘fracking,’ then they would have to seek separate planning permission from the council.”