Frack Free Sherwood Forest and Edwinstowe

by | 29 March 2019 | Notice, Sherwood

The major arguments being put forward in support of fracking include the tens of thousands of jobs it will create and cheaper energy for everyone. We are also told that we will have an energy crisis if we do not go ahead with fracking. However, fracking has no social license.

Regarding jobs, in an interview on Hard Talk Steven Sackur asked the CEO of INEOS (Jim Ratcliffe) where the tens of thousands of jobs would come from. The reply given was that it could not come from the fracking industry itself as they have to use their own teams of qualified staff for safety reasons. His opinion was that the new jobs would come from other manufacturing companies which would be attracted to the area because of cheaper energy. INEOS employed migrant labour on minimum wage contracts to carry out seismic surveys in Sherwood Forest in 2017. Their operations director (Tom Pickering) later admitted that no local jobs had been created.

Cheaper energy seems very unlikely when the energy secretary and financial experts state that there will possibly be no reduction in energy costs. One of the major players in the industry, INEOS, doesn’t want to provide cheaper energy for the masses they want gas for their plastics production. In 2017 the CEO at the time (Gary Haywood) would give no guarantee that the gas would NOT be exported. We should also be asking is fracking financially viable in the UK. In the USA the oil and gas industry promised that 2018 would see the shale gas revolution turning in a profit for their investors for the first time. Instead it has proved to be “another year of pretending to make money”.

The energy crisis also seems to be being magnified out of all proportion. The world is on the brink of a glut of natural gas that could last well into the 2020s and it may prove much cheaper to import the gas we need. We currently import from non EU countries (e.g. Norway) so they will not be affected by Brexit. There would therefore be no danger to sustainability of supply. Demand is reducing due to domestic insulation and energy from renewables is increasing despite the Government withdrawing support, blocking paths and cutting subsidies. Between July and September 2018, the capacity of wind, solar, biomass and hydropower reached 41.9 gigawatts, exceeding the 41.2GW capacity of coal, gas and oil-fired power plants.

If you want to join the Frack Free Sherwood Forest and Edwinstowe group and assist their campaign against fracking, they meet on the first Monday of the month at 7.30pm in Suite 2 Old Station, High Street, Edwinstowe NG21 9HS.