Can shale gas replace 10 years of imports?
Estimates of the UK’s shale gas reserves vary widely. Figures released today by fossil fuel company IGas, one of the major shale players in the UK, suggest it could have found enough to replace 10 to 15 years of gas imports.
The news comes as MPs gather once again to debate the energy bill. The latest estimate will provide ammunition for those MPs hoping to replicate the US’s shale gas revolution, despite some serious doubts over whether shale gas will be as significant in the UK.
10 to 15 years of gas imports?
IGas holds licenses to explore a larger area of the UK for shale gas than any other company. Its new estimate suggests there could be as much as 170 trillion cubic feet of gas in the areas of north-west England it is licensed to drill. This is a top-end estimate – the company also gives a ‘most likely’ estimate of 100 trillion cubic feet, and acknowledges it could be as little as 15 trillion cubic feet.
The company doesn’t think it can extract all of the gas that’s there. IGas’s chief executive, Andrew Austin, told the Today programme he expects to extract about 10 to 15 per cent of what the company has found. If it manages to extract an amount in the middle of that range it would get 21 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s the same as 14 years of UK gas imports, which Austin says are currently around 1.5 trillion cubic feet each year.
That figure is based on the upper limit of IGas’s estimate. The ‘most likely’ find would provide about eight years of UK imports, but it could be as little as about one year’s worth.
Big numbers
Shale gas advocates argue that more gas could be good news for energy security, and for the climate, as burning it releases about half the carbon emissions of coal (though obviously more than renewables). But extracting the gas involves fracking, a technique with potentially damaging and controversial local environmental impacts.
This isn’t the first time the media have reported eye-catchingly high estimates of how much shale gas the UK might have, and each figure seems to be based on a different calculation. While IGas compared its estimate to imports, the figures have been reported elsewhere in terms of energy consumption.
In February last year, the Times claimed the UK had enough shale gas to power the UK for 1500 years. That figure was based on a leaked update to a British Geological Survey (BGS) report and assumed, rather wildly, that all of the gas was recoverable, and that the number of UK households and their energy needs wouldn’t change at all over the course of the next thousand years. IGas’s estimate looks very conservative in comparison.
The BGS update remains unpublished, with the report apparently stuck somewhere in the Department of Energy and Climate Change machinery. It is now expected to be released over the summer with a significantly increased estimate. Just how big that number is remains to be seen.
Not soon
There is still a lot of uncertainty around the impact of shale gas on the UK’s energy mix. The industry is still in the exploration stage and if development does proceed, gas isn’t expected to be flowing onto the UK grid until 2030 at the earliest. The range of IGas’s figures shows how hard it is to even estimate how much gas is in the ground.
It’s likely that by the time the shale gas industry is up and running in the UK we’ll be looking at a pretty different energy landscape altogether.