MPs to challenge proposed British fracking legislation

Shale gas exploration in the UK should be put on hold because it poses environmental threats and is incompatible with agreed climate-change targets, some British politicians will say today.

MPs opposed to fracking will seek to change legislation before the House of Commons that proposes to give companies an automatic right to access lands underground. Such a right is not supported by the British public, according to the Commons’s environmental audit committee.

It says fracking should be prohibited outright in nationally important areas, such as national parks, ancient woodlands and lands that have been designated as areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Only a tiny fraction of the UK’s shale gas reserves can be burned if the rise in global temperatures is to be kept below two degrees, the committee says. Drilling companies should have to prove that they have sufficient backing to cope with any pollution crisis before permits are issued. Methane emissions should have to be fully captured, while a minimum distance between fracking sites and underground aquifers should be laid down.

The legislation before the Commons seeks to maximise “the economic recovery” of the UK’s energy resources, including shale gas. If left unchanged, it would give companies the right to drill hundreds of metres below properties, easing the planning difficulties they currently face.

Dissenting views

However, some leading scientists have taken issue with the views of the dissenting MPs, including Prof Zoe Shipton, of the University of Strathclyde.

Several major studies, she says, have shown that fracking can occur with “relatively little environmental and public health impact”.

Meanwhile, the president of the Geological Society of London, Prof David Manning, has expressed confidence that the risks "can be managed given sufficient care and attention".

Indeed, gas fracked in the UK would be harvested under “more stringent environmental and public health regulations than some other parts of the world where our current gas and petrochemical supply comes from”, he says.

Prof Andrew Aplin, of Durham University, says poor practices in the United States have led to "understandable concerns" in the UK.

He accepts that shale gas production is “broadly incompatible” with the UK’s climate-change pledges, but says a ban, to be credible, would have to be matched by cuts in coal, oil and gas imports.