Fracking (Seismic Activity)

The Cardiff Business School report estimated that the number of wells required in the United Kingdom could be anything from 6,000 to in excess of 30,000 wells. All those wells are clustered in relatively small parts of the country—that is, where the petroleum licences are—and those include my part of the world as well as Yorkshire, Lancashire, little parts of Somerset, and Sussex. The logical extension of talking about 6,000 to 30,000-odd wells—on the basis that a well pad contains a number of them—is the involvement of thousands of locations in a relatively small space of time, if fracking is to have any impact on the replacement of gas imports with internal production. In each area, the impact on the local community will be tremendous.

In my community of Marsh Lane, permission for fracking exploration has been granted against its will. It is in the middle of green-belt land in the Derbyshire countryside that has remained substantially unchanged since the enclosure Acts of 1795. As a result of this application’s having been approved, we are faced with a proposal to place a light industrial estate in the middle of an agricultural field that has been used only for agricultural purposes, as far as we can tell, for more than 200 years, with over 10,000 vehicle movements in the exploratory phase alone; a substantial number of bulks, some over 10 metres high, for the entire period it is there; and a 60-metre-high drill rig during the six months it is being set up—all in the middle of green-belt countryside. That is the impact in just one location. Multiply that by over 1,000 locations and the challenge becomes that we risk substantially industrialising the countryside and other parts of this country where petroleum licences have been issued.

On top of the scale and impact problem comes another problem. There is a desire, because fracking has not been successful in the eight years it has been tested, to tweak the rules to make it more palatable in this country. First, the national planning policy framework was changed several months ago in effect to prioritise fracking and other forms of onshore oil and gas production over other elements, which gave great weight to allowing such energy exploration and production irrespective of where it was—whether in green belt, countryside or other locations that otherwise would be completely ignored and considered inappropriate for such development.

Secondly, an attempt was made last year to loosen the planning policy rules around fracking. It was proposed that fracking exploration—that light industrial estate plonked in the green belt in places such as my constituency —be permitted through the same planning policy processes as those for a kitchen extension and that the actual production, which could last up to 25 years, if not longer, be taken out of the hands of local people and put into the nationally significant infrastructure programme, both of which would be entirely inappropriate and take away control from local people over what happens in their local areas.

Then, in the last few months, after the failure of the first attempts to frack in this country for over half a decade—in Preston—the industry came back and said it wanted to change the rules around earthquakes. During that short two-month period in Lancashire when fracking was attempted before Christmas, more than 50 earthquakes were created near Blackpool—admittedly small ones, but earthquakes none the less—despite the fact that they got no further than about 10% of the way through the industrial process of fracking. If we multiply that impact by the thousand or so sites in the country, we see the scale of the problem.

My Bill proposes to limit the ability of fracking to create earthquakes to its current regulatory acceptable limit of 0.5 on the Richter scale. The industry has clearly indicated that it wants the limits raised, but that would be entirely inappropriate. We should limit fracking activity in line with the existing regulations. The industry signed up to those several years ago, and any change to them would bring great anxiety, distress and worry to communities such as mine.

In conclusion, fracking is controversial because it has not worked, because it is not working and because, in my view, it will not work from a practical and a community-based perspective. For that reason, I seek to limit in legislation the ability of seismic activity to take place over and above what the regulations already state.

That Lee Rowley, Zac Goldsmith, Mr William Wragg, Damien Moore, Mr Simon Clarke, Eddie Hughes, Ben Bradley, Maria Caulfield, Sir Graham Brady, Andrew Lewer and Sir Kevin Barron present the Bill.

Lee Rowley accordingly presented the Bill.