Shale gas - May 23
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Government backtracks on fracking
Matt Chorley, The Independent
The Government has rejected shale gas technology as a solution to Britain's energy crisis, conceding it will do little to cut bills or keep the lights on...
But The Independent on Sunday has learned that industry experts made clear at a meeting attended by senior ministers, including David Cameron and Ed Davey, the Lib Dem energy secretary, that the UK's reserves were smaller than first thought and could be uneconomical to extract.
Now senior coalition figures have agreed that shale gas has the potential to be deeply controversial without securing major benefits in lowering carbon emissions or reducing energy costs...
(20 May 2012)
The sudden reversal is refuted in this Press Association report from May 22.-SO
Investor's concerns lead to calls for fracking changes
Guy Chazen, Financial Times
A top-10 investor in BP and Shell calls for end to emissions of the greenhouse gas in production of shale hydrocarbons...
(22 May 2012)
Fracking In New York: For Farmers, Gas Drilling Could Mean Salvation-- Or Ruin
Mary Esch, Huffington Post
When Dan Fitzsimmons looks across the Susquehanna River and sees the flares of Pennsylvania gas wells, he thinks bitterly of the riches beneath his own land locked up by the heated debate that has kept hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, out of New York.
"I go over the border and see people planting orchards, buying tractors, putting money back in their land," said Fitzsimmons, a Binghamton landowner who heads the 70,000-member Joint Landowners Coalition of New York. "We'd like to do that too, but instead we struggle to pay the taxes and to hang onto our farms."
While New York state has had a moratorium on shale gas development for four years while the Department of Environmental Conservation completes an environmental impact review, thousands of wells have gone into production in Pennsylvania. Both states, along with Ohio and West Virginia, overlie the vast Marcellus Shale deposit, which has been made productive by the advent of horizontal drilling and fracking...
(20 May 2012)
