Friends of the Earth says countryside would be industrialised with a new well fracked daily until 2035

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

More than 6,000 shale gas wells would be needed to replace half the UK’s gas imports over a 15-year period, according to a new report.

The nascent UK fracking industry has argued that growing reliance on gas from Norway and Qatar necessitates developing home-produced supplies in addition to North Sea output.

Recent arrivals of Russian gas by ship have prompted shale advocates to repeat the argument.

However, analysis for Friends of the Earth by the Cardiff Business School found that at least one well would need to be drilled and fracked daily between 2021 and 2035 to replace 50% of gas imports.

Rose Dickinson, at Friends of the Earth, said: “This would mean an industrialisation of our countryside at a rate that nobody has yet fully appreciated and would put many more communities in the firing line of this dirty and unwanted industry.”

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The FoE research found 6,100 wells on 1,000 well pads would take up around 3,560 hectares of land (around 13 square miles), based on analysis of government figures, National Grid forecasts and other data.

But no one expects there to be that many wells. The most bullish estimate came in a 2013 report by the Institute of Directors, forecasting 4,000 wells by 2032.

The government admits its most recent estimate of 155 wells by 2025, produced last year, is already out of date.

Q&A What is fracking? Show Hide Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a way of extracting natural gas from shale rock formations that are often deep underground. It involves pumping water, chemicals and usually sand underground at high pressure to fracture shale – hence the name – and release the gas trapped within to be collected back at the surface. The technology has transformed the US energy landscape in the last decade, owing to the combination of high-volume fracking – 1.5m gallons of water per well, on average – and the relatively modern ability to drill horizontally into shale after a vertical well has been drilled. In England, the government placed a moratorium on fracking in November 2019 after protests, legal challenges and planning rejections. A year earlier, the energy company Cuadrilla was forced to stop work at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire twice in four days due to minor earthquakes occurring while it was fracking. The tremors breached a seismic threshold imposed after fracking caused minor earthquakes at a nearby Cuadrilla site in 2011. In March 2019 the high court ruled that the government's fracking guidelines were unlawful because they had failed to sufficiently consider scientific evidence against fracking.

The research comes as the shale firm Cuadrilla prepares to frack in Lancashire between July and September, which would be the first time a company has fracked in the UK since 2011.



The industry’s exploratory phase has been repeatedly delayed, with companies including Ineos, iGas and Third Energy bogged down in planning, and dogged by protests.

Government polling on Thursday will reveal the latest public sentiment on extracting shale gas. There was a small uptick in support in February, but twice as many people still opposed it.

Ken Cronin, chief executive of shale trade body, UK Onshore Oil and Gas, said: “This is a poor quality report, which uses data for well productivity which is years out of date and far lower than the current US average to arrive at artificially high numbers of wells.”