The madness of Ed Miliband’s fracking ban

The UK has been reliant on importing natural gas from overseas for over two decades now. What makes this situation so absurd is that for several years the British state has wilfully refused access to an abundant energy source underneath our feet – namely, shale gas. This is due, so the authorities claim, to the putative earthquake risk posed by the method of extraction, a form of high-tech, high-productivity horizontal drilling, otherwise known as fracking.

The madness of this situation was brought home once again this month after the discovery of a huge field of shale gas in the Gainsborough Trough underneath Lincolnshire. It amounts to an estimated 480 billion cubic metres and could provide enough gas to meet Britain’s demand for between five and 10 years.

But Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy security and Net Zero, isn’t interested. Quite the opposite. Just days after the discovery of the Lincolnshire shale-gas field was announced, a spokesperson for Miliband’s energy department announced that the existing 2019 moratorium on fracking should stay in place because of the risk of ‘seismic events’. It then reiterated Miliband’s commitment to implementing a permanent ban on fracking in the name of fighting climate change.

This is typical of Miliband. He will ban anything in pursuit of Net Zero, regardless of the cost to society. Indeed, one of the first things he did when taking office in 2024 was to ban all new drilling licences in the North Sea, effectively capping offshore oil and gas production in the UK. That he now also wants a permanent ban on onshore fracking is utterly unsurprising.

Miliband claims that the point of bans on fracking and offshore oil and gas production is to make Britain a clean-energy superpower and, according to his department spokesperson, to ‘protect both family and national finances from [the] price spikes’ that come with dependency on foreign fossil-fuel markets.

Energy security, and especially independence from ‘the whims of petrostates and dictators’, as his office puts it, has been a prominent focus during Miliband’s time as energy secretary. Yet Britain’s reliance on ‘petrostates or dictators’ is being overstated. In 2023, autocratic Qatar sold Britain gas that amounted to just six per cent of total UK imports. Imports from iffy regimes in Peru, Angola, Algeria and Nigeria were even lower.

As for ‘energy independence from tyrants like Putin’, which then opposition leader Keir Starmer called for in September 2022, Britain had already received its last cargo of gas from Putin in March 2022. So Britain really isn’t dependent on ‘petrostates and dictators’ for its energy supplies at all.

But energy security and our reliance on imports do remain an issue. Even as Britain moves towards renewables, gas is still needed as a back-up energy source for the foreseeable future. As even the Climate Change Committee, the government’s own greenist watchdog, admits, the UK is currently estimated to have a shortfall of more than one trillion cubic metres of gas between now and 2050. This means Britain will remain reliant on imported gas, and therefore the vagaries of the world market, for many years to come, regardless of how many wind farms or solar panels that Miliband rolls out. This is why it is doubly absurd for Miliband to press ahead with a ban on fracking. He is wilfully squandering a huge energy source within the British Isles.

The British state’s aversion to fracking is not all down to one man, of course. It was Boris Johnson’s Tory government in 2019 that originally imposed the moratorium on fracking operations on the grounds they could cause ‘seismic events’, which it categorised as anything registering above 0.5 on the Richter scale.

One wonders if Britain’s politicians understand the Richter Scale. It is logarithmic rather than linear, which means that each whole number on the scale represents a tenfold increase in the amount of energy released by the seismic event.

For instance, the seismic shocks at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road fracking site in Lancashire in 2019 registered 2.9 on the Richter Scale and caused damage to property. This was enough to prompt the Tory government to put an effective stop to fracking.

Yet those shocks were tiny. The Richter reading for a ‘moderate’ seismic shock, which is capable of damaging some poorly built structures, is 5.9. The displacement of ground that may have been caused by Cuadrilla in 2019 was 1,000 times smaller than what is normally considered ‘moderate’. Indeed, according to the British Geological Survey, between 1979 and 1994, Britain received an average 26 shocks of similar scale to the 2019 seismic shock every year, and no one batted an eyelid.

Every way you look at it, the ban on fracking for shale gas makes no sense. It is based on wildly exaggerated fears about seismic activity. And it is standing in the way of the energy independence that Ed Miliband claims he is aiming for.

This fear-mongering green dogma is doing great damage to the UK.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen