Britain Holds Biggest Shale Basin In The World

The British Geological Survey (BGS) report estimates that there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas trapped in the Bowland shale basin alone. In fact, the BGS’s upper estimate is almost twice that figure, 2281 tcf. This would make it by far the biggest shale basin in the world. 10% of Bowland Shale would equal 130 trillion cubic feet – or about 50 years of total UK consumption. There are many other shale areas in Britain. And then there are Britain’s offshore shale reserves: ”There will be a lot more offshore shale gas and oil resources than onshore,” Nigel Smith, subsurface geologist and geophysicist at the British Geological Survey (BGS) said. UK offshore reserves could be five to 10 times as high as onshore, said. --The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 27 June 2013

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The figures for potential UK shale gas reserves just went stratospheric. The UK Government has now confirmed the much-rumoured finding that UK shale gas resources are potentially huge – as much as twice the size of the highest previous assessment. According to the British Geological Survey report which focuses on just one shale gas play, the Bowland Shale in the UK north-west, the basin could hold as much as 1300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas – while the upper figure potential suggests 2000tcf. For further perspective, even the major successful US shale plays are nowhere near as thick as the Bowland Shale. While the former average around 300 feet in thickness, the Bowland Shale is, in places, around 6,000 feet thick. --Peter Gover, The Commentator, 27 June 2013 Last week the drilling company Cuadrilla Resources announced that it had discovered an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas under a small patch of land in the north-west of England. The find suggests that Britain has considerably more shale gas resources than earlier estimations predicted – possibly by an order of magnitude. Britain may be sitting on a huge gold mine of cheap, abundant and comparatively clean energy that could supply the UK's energy needs for a century or more. If cheap shale gas were to displace expensive renewables and expensive imported energy, the price of electricity would fall significantly. --Benny Peiser, Public Service Europe, 27 September 2011

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Following the shale revolution, policymakers can no longer count on peaking oil and gas supplies and soaring fuel prices to save the world from potentially catastrophic climate change. As the peak-oil panic of 2008 recedes, it has become clear that there are more than enough fossil fuel reserves to cook the planet many times over. “Climate change has slipped down the policy agenda,” the International Energy Agency admitted in a special report on “Redrawing the energy-climate map”. --John Kemp, Reuters, 25 June 2013 The Energy Bill has passed through the House of Commons with strong support – indeed most of the challenges were to make the commitments to carbon reduction more ambitious. The Bill is based on a number of assumptions. The first of these is already dead. When the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 the expectation was that it would be part of an international agreement. There is no international agreement, nor will there be. Other assumptions, if not dead, are now looking distinctly shaky. Finally there is the assumption that the costs of fossil fuels will rise sharply, which has been thrown into doubt by the new technologies for exploiting shale gas and oil. --Lord Turnbull, The House Magazine, 26 June 2013 While clamping down on coal emissions with their new initiative to address climate change, it looks like the Obama administration is embracing natural gas extraction instead. That means fracking, the controversial recovery method that's driving America's natural gas boom, will continue. --Rob Wile, The Business Insider, 25 June 2013

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