It was always a poisoned chalice, mediating between multinational fracking firms and the local communities dead set against the extreme form of energy extraction in their backyards. Nonetheless, it still shocked many when the government’s “shale commissioner”, the former Labour MP Natascha Engel, resigned at the end of last month after barely six months in the job.

The role was impossible, despaired Engel, who lost her seat in North East Derbyshire in 2017 after coming out in favour of fracking in the constituency. The government, she complained, was “choosing to listen to a powerful environmental lobby campaigning against fracking rather than allowing science and evidence to guide our policymaking”.

Hurrah, thought Dave Shaw, as the news filtered through to Doncaster. Six years after he co-formed Frack Free South Yorkshire to oppose shale gas extraction on his doorstep, he was joyous. Over the phone in the following days, he said: “I most definitely feel we are winning. I feel like we are hammering the last nail in the coffin of the fracking industry.”

Until 2011, hardly anyone in the UK who wasn’t a geologist had heard of fracking, which is the process of creating fractures in shale rock formations to release natural gas trapped inside. Then there was a series of small earthquakes caused by fracking near Blackpool by a firm called Cuadrilla. Concerns began to mount and the government issued a moratorium on fracking. But in December 2012, the government lifted the ban and began issuing exploration licences covering large swathes of the UK, including about 95% of South Yorkshire.

Shaw – who is a Labour councillor as well as a builder – has been at the forefront of the fightback. Last week, he was in the final planning stages of one of the best-publicised protests yet, at the Tour de Yorkshire cycle race. Team Sky – the British squad that has won the Tour de France in six of the past seven years – were racing, only they had transformed into Team Ineos, after their new sponsor, a petrochemical and plastic-producing company that holds licences to frack all over Yorkshire.

Shaw, a former music-marketing man who helped plug artists from Britney Spears to Björk, saw the PR potential. TV cameras would be following the team’s every move, particularly with Chris Froome, a four-time winner of the yellow jersey, on the road. Also, policing the course’s almost 400 miles of public road is nigh on impossible.

“My genuine reaction was: great!” said Shaw the night before the race began in Doncaster last Thursday. “It gives us an opportunity to highlight what Ineos is doing and talk about the hypocrisy of Team Sky, who rode around last season with whales on the back of their jerseys as part of a campaign against plastic pollution in the oceans and are now being sponsored by [one of] the biggest producers of plastics [in Europe].”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An anti-fracking protest at Preston New Road in Blackpool. Photograph: Ki Price/Getty Images

Ineos was worried enough to hold its launch in a secret location, with sports journalists told to assemble at London King’s Cross at 6am, before being transported to “a historic Yorkshire venue”. Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos’s owner and reportedly Britain’s richest man, swooped in by helicopter with the team director, Dave Brailsford. But after umbrella group Frack Free United announced it had bought 15,000 face masks depicting Ratcliffe as the devil, every journalist at the launch asked the men for their views on fracking.

It wasn’t just Shaw who put Engel’s departure down to anti-fracking protests. In a letter to the Financial Times, David Montagu-Smith, a director of Rathlin Energy, a UK oil and gas exploration company, said it was “just one more success for the relentless anti-oil-and-gas crusaders in the environmental lobby”.

Oilprice.com, an energy news website, published a post headlined “The beginning of the end for British shale gas”, which noted that “unlike most gas producers around the globe … shale operators in the UK have to face a very committed and highly organised opponent, environmental activists”. Written by Viktor Katona, a Russian analyst, it ended: “The UK is just a couple of steps away from giving up on its shale gas altogether.”

It has certainly been a rapid turnaround for the anti-fracking movement, which only last September was dismissed by the energy minister, Claire Perry, as “a travelling circus of protesters”. Two weeks later, three anti-fracking protesters were jailed after blocking a convoy of trucks carrying drilling equipment from entering the Preston New Road fracking site near Blackpool. They were soon freed on appeal, after a judge ruled their 15- and 16-month custodial sentences were “manifestly excessive”.

The ensuing publicity was a boon for the cause, thinks Tina Louise Rothery. The former copywriter and Blackpool B&B landlady has devoted the past eight years to opposing fracking at Preston New Road and is due to stand trial twice this month for obstructing the site entrance – first by dancing in front of a truck and then by locking herself to another protester outside a caravan dumped at the gates.

Rothery, 57, is the ring leader of the Nanas, a group of women who for years have been protesting daily against Cuadrilla. Wearing yellow tabards and headscarves, they dish out tea and cakes and have a particular genius for publicity stunts. One protest last summer saw the site festooned with bras – a lacy nod to studies that suggested a link between proximity to fracking wells and an increase in cases of breast cancer.

Rothery owes Cuadrilla £54,000, having being sued for trespass after the Nanas occupied the site in 2014 when it was still fields. A full-time protester, she has no earnings and claims no benefits, so will never pay it, she admits cheerfully. “The judge accepted that I won’t, unless I win the lottery.”

Rothery and her comrades have kept a 24-hour watch over the site since October 2016, when the government overruled Lancashire county council and gave Cuadrilla the green light to frack. Just like the jailing of the three protesters, that decision was helpful in gathering sympathy. “People who weren’t anti-fracking but were pro-democracy, and regular people in our area who don’t pay attention to the environment, heard that there was a decision made by our council which Westminster wasn’t keen on and decided to turn it over. It woke a lot of people up.”

When she resigned, Engel said the government had imposed a “de facto ban” on fracking by forcing the industry to stop work every time there is a microtremor of 0.5 magnitude. In the US, which thanks to fracking is now the biggest producer of gas, the limit is 4.0. Perry has refused to raise the limit despite once dismissing a tremor of 1.1 as being “the equivalent on the surface of a bag of flour falling on the floor”.

Perry’s reticence could be explained by dwindling support for fracking among Tory MPs. Lee Rowley, who chairs the new all-party parliamentary group looking into the impact of shale gas (and who replaced Engel as MP for North East Derbyshire), told the Guardian in November that he was seeing an increasing number of Tory colleagues with worries. The Richmond MP, Zac Goldsmith, meanwhile, warned that fracking had “the potential to turn whole regions against the government”.

Francis Egan, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, has lobbied hard against the seismic threshold, which has meant that the company has managed to complete the hydraulic fracture of just two of the 41 sections of the Preston New Road well. After Engel’s departure, he pointed out that key government projects such as Crossrail produce ground vibrations “far in excess [of 0.5] every working day. The situation is beyond ridiculous, it’s embarrassing. It is time now to allow the system to be reviewed by qualified experts,” he said.

Contacted by the Guardian on Tuesday, however, Cuadrilla insisted that “investors remained committed to unlocking the opportunity shale gas presented for both Lancashire and the country as a whole”.

None of the other main parties support fracking in England. The Scottish government does not support the development of unconventional oil and gas and there is a de facto ban in Wales, too. In Northern Ireland, there is a “presumption against” the extraction of unconventional hydrocarbons “until there is sufficient and robust evidence on all environmental impacts” – a stance mirrored by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, and Sadiq Khan, his London counterpart.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tina Louise Rothery. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Yet the UK’s shale gas industry maintains its efforts are securing the country’s economic future, at a time when about half of the gas consumed in the UK is imported. It argues that moving to gas from coal has resulted in sharp drops in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions over the past three decades, helping to meet government and international targets on climate change. It will be necessary to use the fuel for years to come, it claims, adding that research suggests using gas produced in the UK has a lower carbon footprint than that produced abroad.

Part of the problem for proponents of fracking, however, is what Engel called “its uniquely awful name”. This is something protestors and the industry agree on. “The energy industry never calls it fracking, because it sounds so destructive,” Shaw says. “They prefer ‘hydraulic fracturing’, which sounds more benign. But our success has been dominating internet searches, so that the dangers of it come up first.” Type “fracking” into Google and the first autocomplete suggestion is: “What is fracking and why is it bad?”

Bobbing about at the Tour de Yorkshire last week, Steve Mason was another upbeat protester. The campaign director of Frack Free United, he had just photobombed Brailsford outside the Ineos bus while wearing the Ratcliffe devil mask. “Are we winning?” he said. “We have done bloody well. But until the exploration licences go back to the government, we won’t have won. We can’t get complacent. It would only take a general election with Conservatives winning 50 more seats to send us back to the start.”

Polling shows a mixed response among the public at large. A study late last year found that only 13% of the public actively supported fracking, while 35% were opposed – but just under half (47%) were neither supportive nor opposed. Which is a big difference from the Guardian’s polling from 2013, which found 44% in favour and 30% against, with 26% undecided. More people, it seems are undecided after more than half a decade of protest, and little progress on production. Which goes to show that everything is still up for grabs.

Over in Lancashire, Rothery is reflective. “No one here feels like a winner in any of this. It’s eight years of our lives stolen from us. If we succeed in stopping it, then there would be rejoicing in the future that we have preserved for our children. But there is no winning. They’ve already caused so many rifts in communities. But do we feel like they are on their way out as an industry? Absolutely.”