Not exactly those words but not far off! Nigel Lee from Nottingham Friends of the Earth and I went last Thursday to sit and watch the Environment and Sustainability Committee of Nottinghamshire County Council meet to discuss various issues including giving permission for a public consultation on the new Minerals Local Plan. The Government requires that all Mineral Planning Authorities must set out policies about how applications for exploration, appraisal and extraction are dealt with. If adopted the plan will be in place till 2030 so it is important that fracking does not take any part of it.
The public consultation was voted through but it was just a formality. What was interesting was seeing where various Councillors stood on the issue, although not all of them spoke. Nigel and I were shocked to hear one Councillor say that shale gas extraction was a good thing because of the jobs it would create and another Councillor said that Nottinghamshire was blessed with large amounts of minerals so it is only right that we exploit them to the max. So two characters in favour of fracking that spoke out and said so and one other who was probably in favour of it but he didn’t speak out.
Although Nigel and I arrived early enough for the debate, the door to the public gallery was not open in time for the beginning and we missed the start of a very interesting PowerPoint presentation by the planners about hydrocarbons. After it was all over we went and complained that we had missed the beginning of the meeting and the presentation so they very kindly gave us a paper copy of the slides and a full agenda. The slides were very useful and in a later blog I will use the contents of them to give you tips on how to respond to the public consultation when it comes out later in the month.
The PowerPoint presentation showed outline maps of Nottinghamshire and the minerals the county contained. Although as campaigners, we have been concentrating on fracking of shale gas to obtain methane, methane can also be extracted from coal. In the very olden days it used to be called firedamp (damps being the term used for any gas found in a mine) and was the cause of many an underground explosion and was also responsible for hundreds of deaths prior to the Davy safety lamp. We all know that coal has been mined in Nottinghamshire for years and years and some mines have been worked out. There is still methane in these mines and it has to be pumped out for safety reasons. It is generally known as coal mine gas and is usually burned on site to provide electricity. But unworked coal seams still contain methane as, effectively, little bubbles of gas attached to the coal. That is coal bed methane (CBM) and it can be obtained by fracking of the coal bed in the same way that shale is fracked. Scarily the whole of the east side of the county contains deep unworked coal seams that can be fracked for CBM. Already there are planning applications by Dart Energy in place to explore for CBM near Retford in the north of the county. Dart Energy have bought 12 licences to explore for hydrocarbons from DECC and they reckon 7 of them can be fracked for shale gas.
But luckily for us, all the companies are watching what is happening in Lancashire before they proceed. And also if we all sign up to wrongmove which is aiming to create a legal block to fracking by challenging the ability of fracking companies to frack under peoples homes, we can hopefully stop these companies in their tracks.
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