Shame on the SNP nimbies who have said no to fracking
By Graham Grant
NO less an intellectual heavyweight than Mhairi Black warned last year of a wicked Westminster plot to foist fracking on Scotland.
The SNP MP for Paisley said ‘we had the chance in 2014 to make sure that all decisions affecting Scotland would be taken here’.
‘Don’t be too surprised,’ she said, ‘if the Tories, under significant pressure from their supporters in the energy industry, try to… impose fracking on Scotland’.
A dire warning, indeed, but hang on – fracking is devolved to the Scottish parliament, and the UK Government has made clear that Holyrood has the right to block its use north of the Border.
Miss Black’s blundering and deceitful intervention is representative of the wider approach her party has taken to fracking – the shorthand name given to the business of pumping water at high pressure into rock, forcing it to crack and release gas.
The Scottish Government is believed to be preparing to announce an outright ban on fracking, possibly within days, after nearly three years of dithering and confusion.
The party introduced a moratorium on fracking in January 2015, but in the run-up to the Holyrood election last year it bought thousands of ‘Frack Off’ badges – while insisting it had yet to make up its mind.
Nicola Sturgeon has said she is open to persuasion on fracking, but her mentor Alex Salmond is adamant that it will ‘not have a substantial early stage future’.
Edinburgh East SNP MP Tommy Sheppard has echoed Mr Salmond’s commitment to green energy, saying that ‘our aim is for 100 per cent of our energy to come from renewables in the near future’.
This is the kind of pie-in-the-sky drivel that is hardly surprising from a party that based vital economic assumptions about an independent Scotland on soaring oil prices that never materialised.
Its fetish for ineffectual wind farms and now electric cars – with little idea of how they will all be powered – has led to a blinkered appraisal of a technology that could lead to a jobs boom.
We can be in no doubt that its prevarication has been driven by a desperate desire to placate the increasingly disenchanted Nationalist powerbase, which ahead of the 2014 referendum campaigned against fracking.
This was confirmed by Martyn Day, the SNP MP whose constituency includes Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, site of the huge Ineos petrochemical plant (which depends, ironically, on shale gas as its raw material – shipped from the US).
Mr Day has said that ‘even if they [experts] come back with evidence to say this can be done, technically, safely and without a problem, the issue then becomes reputational damage’ – so Mr Day would not support it under any circumstances.
Tom Pickering, operations director of Ineos Shale, has condemned this ‘anywhere but Scotland’ attitude.
It was only four years ago that Labour, SNP and Lib Dem politicians all went down on bended knee to keep the Ineos plant open.
The first Ineos tanker carrying American shale gas sailed under the Forth bridges in September last year, ready to start a ‘virtual pipeline’ from the US to Grangemouth, where the gas can be converted into plastic for business use.
But there were no SNP politicians to welcome the shipment: Finance Secretary Derek Mackay and Cabinet colleague Keith Brown – the minister in charge of the economy – were spotted in the Holyrood canteen shortly after the shipment’s arrival.
And yet the political paralysis reaches beyond the SNP: Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens have already made their opposition to fracking clear.
Claudia Beamish, Labour’s environment spokesman, has said ‘anything less than an outright ban of onshore fracking in all its forms would be a betrayal by the SNP Government of our climate change commitments, our communities and the job opportunities now and for future generations in clean, renewable energy’.
Yet research in 2014 found that wind farms only operate anywhere near their full potential for an average of 17 hours a year – and tidal power has so far failed to live up to its initial promise.
For a country with a proud history of engineering and scientific excellence, this pathological aversion to fracking among our political class is depressing – not least because Scottish scientists are already working on innovations to support its introduction.
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre have discovered that natural deposits of helium gas could help the safe production of shale or coal gas.
The discovery of high levels of helium in UK coal seams could help scientists to monitor the secure recovery of coal or shale gas from underground sites.
Any gas leaks from deep underground would be accompanied by a rise in helium levels, which could be easily detected.
Detractors of fracking have long warned that it will cause untold environmental disaster, destroying swathes of natural landscape (although they’re all remarkably relaxed about eyesore wind farms).
But the fracking moratorium began just six months after the Scottish Government’s independent expert scientific panel had concluded that the technology exists to allow safe extraction of shale gas, subject to robust regulation.
KPMG has estimated that 20 drilling areas or ‘pads’ would have to be built if fracking were given the go-ahead, and they would each be around the size of a football pitch.
As Sandy Telfer, a partner with global law firm DLA Piper, has observed, the ‘concern expressed in some quarters that the Midland Valley of Scotland [the Central Lowlands] will come to resemble a Texan oilfield if shale gas development is allowed to proceed is somewhat fanciful’.
KPMG research conducted on behalf of the Scottish Government also found that fracking could generate billions of pounds and thousands of jobs for the Scottish economy.
The extraction of shale gas could attract up to £6.5billion of investment up to 2062 and create 3,100 jobs, creating up to £3.9billion in tax revenues and producing the equivalent of 18 years of Scottish gas consumption.
In 2015, an expert the SNP asked to research fracking claimed that SNP ministers were deliberately misleading the Scottish public by pretending their fracking ban was about health and environmental concerns – instead of political posturing.
Professor Paul Younger, Rankine Chair of Engineering at the University of Glasgow, said the Scottish Government’s justifications for the moratorium were ‘all made up’ and ‘completely feigned’.
He was one of the experts who said there were no significant technological barriers to developing fracking and that it could be conducted safely. The research was initially praised by the SNP.
But Professor Younger said he later felt ‘completely violated as a professional’ following the announcement of the moratorium, and accused the SNP of treating the issue as a ‘political football’.
If the fracking ban is indeed instigated, it will be yet another act of cowardice from a party that consistently puts its own survival ahead of the country’s economic future.
