Scotland on Sunday: Shale power would be a rock solid investment

A SHOCKING 900,000 Scottish households are in fuel poverty, meaning they are unable to afford adequate warmth in the home. And the rising bills causing strife to families and businesses across Scotland are in no small part due to the billions of pounds in subsidies paid directly by consumers to energy companies to fund the Scottish Government’s vision of a renewable-powered future.

One alternative solution may be through the exploitation of our potentially impressive reserves of gas from an as yet untapped source. Extracting this fuel – mostly “shale” gas trapped in sandstone underground – may help us reduce our dependency on imported gas from geopolitically sensitive areas such as Russia and the Middle East. The SNP government must recognise that shale gas is likely to be a major part of the global energy mix for the foreseeable future and they must therefore at least consider the capacities of extraction technologies. Yet sadly they seem lukewarm in their desire to do so.  

A recent initiative by Australian-owned Dart Energy (Europe) Ltd to sink a £1 million test bore at Airth, near Falkirk, in a bid to extract huge reserves of methane gas from coal seams, has come in for criticism from Green groups including Friends of the Earth Scotland, WWF Scotland and the Green Party. Meanwhile, the SNP government has been slow to discourage such blanket opposition, perhaps in part for fear that the development of a buoyant shale gas industry in Scotland would reduce gas prices dramatically and further undermine the already shaky economic arguments underpinning the renewables sector’s rapid expansion.  MORE