Now that fracking has resumed in Lancashire after a seven year hiatus, the green lobby which sought to frustrate it and delay it at every turn can reflect on what they have achieved: keeping the UK’s carbon emissions rather higher than they would have been, had our native fracking industry been allowed to develop more quickly.
In the short term at least, the alternative to burning UK-produced shale gas is not, as the green lobby says, using more energy from wind and solar farms. We do not currently have anything close to the electricity storage capacity to cope with a supply which comes exclusively from intermittent sources, and is it not clear at present how this will be resolved. For now, the real alternative to shale gas is either coal or imported gas. Both involve significantly higher carbon emissions than UK-produced shale gas would.
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