Lord Lawson’s shale gas boosterism
Lord Lawson, chair of climate skeptic thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), has come out for fracking in the Sun today. No surprises there, perhaps. His endorsement comes days after eccentric London Mayor, Boris Johnson, encouraged the government to leave “no stone… unfracked”, including fracking the capital.
The Chancellor, George Osborne is a shale enthusiast, and must be thrilled all these Tory grandees are coming out to support his favourite energy source. But is the shale gas boosterism justified?
The British Geological Survey (BGS) released an updated estimate of the UK’s shale resources a few weeks ago, putting the figure at a whopping 1300 trillion cubic feet.
Those are big numbers, so the media often tries to condense them – telling us how many years that amount of gas could power the UK for, or how much that is compared to other countries.
Lawson does the same, but his numbers don’t seem to match up with what we currently know about the UK’s shale reserves.
50 to 100 years of shale gas?
Lawson says:
“According to the British Geological Survey, there is enough now known to lie under Lancashire and Yorkshire alone to satisfy all the UK’s needs at the present rate of consumption for between 50 and 100 years.”
Presumably this is based on BGS’s most recent estimate, which looked at the north of England. So will we get up to a century of gas from shale in the UK?
The short answer is nobody really knows. Calculating how many years of shale gas is depends on two things: how much can be extracted, and how much we expect to use.
At the BGS report launch, Professor Mike Stephenson, BGS’s head of energy, was at pains to emphasise that its new estimate was of resources – how much is in the ground – not ‘reserves’ (how much can be got out). He said it was too early to say how much would eventually be recovered.
When the BGS report was released, some newspapers had a stab at the same calculation and came up with lower figures. The Guardian said there was enough for 25 years of demand, while the Times said it was more like 43 years. These figures are based on getting 10 per cent of the reserves out the ground – in line with previous BGS estimates, and about average for US wells.
They may be a bit optimistic. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which has looked at shale gas reserves and resources across the world, expects the UK’s extraction rate to be closer to four per cent – although this was an estimate made before the BGS survey was published.
The UK’s complex geology, tougher regulation, less developed infrastructure, and lower levels of public acceptance is likely to make it harder to get at the reserves than in the US. It seems a slightly lower extraction rate might be a sensible assumption.
The UK’s current annual gas consumption is about 3 tcf. This could go up or down, according to the UK’s energy regulator Ofgem, depending on how quickly the UK decarbonises.
So Lawson is either assuming we can extract more of the gas than anyone else – including the BGS and EIA – or he’s assuming gas demand falls significantly, allowing the UK to eke out its resources for longer.
The largest reserves in Europe?
Lawson also says the UK has “what seem to be the largest shale reserves in Europe”. Again, it’s not clear where he gets this from, but it doesn’t match-up with others’ comparisons.
The EIA did a survey of the world’s shale fields earlier this year. Based on what it found, it calculated an estimate of each country’s total shale gas resources. As the bar chart below shows, France and Poland seem to have much larger shale gas resources than the UK.
Image - shale gas by country 2 (note)
Comparing those estimates to the BGS resource estimate (the red bar) may not be a particularly smart idea, given the methodological differences between the two reports. The BGS also only focusses on the north of England, as this is where it expects most of the resource to be. But even with the BGS’s much higher estimate, the UK is still probably a long way behind France and Poland.
So we could say the Brits are luckier than the Spaniards, Germans and Dutch, but the French and Poles have hit the European shale jackpot. Although neither seem that keen on the fuel: the Polish government is considering a tax hike on any profits from shale gas which could put off potential investors, and the French government has so far refused to lift a fracking ban first implemented in 2011.
Why is Lawson so keen to promote shale gas?
Lord Lawson’s climate skeptic views are well-known and he puts them to work in the Sun again today to bolster arguments for developing of a UK shale gas industry.
He says the only reason we aren’t drilling for shale gas is because of environmental activists and government officials “motivated by a quasi-religious obsession that carbon dioxide, essential for life on this planet and produced when gas or oil is burned, is somehow evil”.
While the UK’s commitment to keeping within a particular carbon budget is an obstacle to shale gas development, Lawson’s statement that climate change concern is “a belief without any serious scientific substance” is more spurious.
Lord Lawson’s statements today are simply keeping in line with those of his skeptic think tank, which seems pleased at the idea of a shale gas boom diverting resources from genuinely low carbon forms of power generation.