“We have agreed on an outright ban on fraccing in national parks, sites of special interest and areas of natural beauty,” junior energy minister Amber Rudd said.
Rudd’s comments came during a debate over new laws to regulate the extraction process which is required to unlock the UK’s strategically critical shale gas potential.
It is a massive blow to the industry when analysts had started becoming optimistic that 2015 could finally be a watershed year for the nation’s shale gas industry.
Liberal Democrat Environment Secretary Ed Davey accepted a report compiled by a cross-party Environmental Audit Committee which raised “uncertainties” about fraccing, including risks of polluting groundwater and water supplies, noise concerns, general disruption to local communities and greater road congestion.
The report also claimed there was little public acceptance of fraccing and asked for a temporary ban on any projects. A number of MPs went even further calling for a moratorium on fraccing.
Lawmakers, however, voted down a separate bid to introduce such a moratorium.
“Ultimately, fraccing cannot be compatible with our long-term commitments to cut climate changing emissions unless full-scale carbon capture and storage technology is rolled out rapidly, which currently looks unlikely,” committee chair and Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, Joan Walley, said.
“There are also huge uncertainties around the impact that fraccing could have on water supplies, air quality and public health.
“We cannot allow Britain’s national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty to be developed into oil and gas fields. Even if a national moratorium on shale drilling in the UK is not accepted there should be an outright ban on fraccing in such special sites.”
She accused the government of trying to “rush through” changes to the trespass laws that would allow companies to frac under people’s homes without permission.
Labour energy spokeswoman Caroline Flint called the move “a huge u-turn” and said the government had been forced to accept that tough protections and proper safeguards had to be in place before fraccing would go ahead.
The GMB Union, which has over 630,000 members, has written to Labour MPs supporting fraccing, warning that energy security is at stake.
“It would be premature to rule out the prospect of fraccing when we don’t know if the industry is viable and, crucially, when so many of the issues around energy security of supply remain unresolved,” the Union said.
“This seems an astonishingly sound view to be propagated by a Union, and the Unite Union has apparently written a similar letter to MPs.”
Meanwhile University of Leeds academic, Professor of Petroleum Geoengineering Quentin Fisher, said it was “disappointing to see a government committee putting the ill-informed views of anti-fraccing groups ahead of evidence-based scientific studies”
“The report totally overstates the dangers of shale gas extraction, such as groundwater pollution, health risk and geological integrity,” he said.
“Gas will be a significant part of the UK’s energy mix for the foreseeable future and it is preferable that we are as self-sufficient as possible.”
Last year London-based explorer Celtique Energie’s application to explore for shale oil and gas within a national park in southern England, where large reserves are believed to exist, was rejected.
