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UK will struggle to meet climate target if fracking goes ahead

By Michael Le Page

7 July 2016

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It’s bad news for the UK’s wannabe frackers.

A long-awaited report from the UK’s Climate Change Committee, an independent body, says that fracking will not bust the nation’s carbon budget — but only if three strict conditions are met.

Those conditions are going to be very difficult to meet in practice, which means the UK government cannot allow fracking on a large scale if the country is to meet its emissions targets.

Under the 2008 Climate Act, the UK has to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

The Climate Change Committee is responsible for setting interim targets – the carbon budget – and providing progress reports. As part of this, it has prepared a report on whether fracking is compatible with the UK’s carbon budgets.

The report was supposed to have come out months ago, but was only released by ministers on 7 July – the day after the Chilcot report on the Iraq war. Some have accused the ministers of “sitting on” the report to help the fracking industry.

The report concludes that fracking for shale gas and oil is not necessarily incompatible with the UK’s carbon budget, but only if three conditions are met. The first is that fracking wells must be tightly regulated and monitored from the time they are first drilled to the time they are decommissioned to minimise methane emissions.

This will increase the costs, says geologist Richard Davies of Newcastle University in the UK, who is part of the ReFINE research consortium looking at fracking. But the costs of dealing with waste water will be greater, he says.

The second condition set out by the report is that overall gas consumption in the UK must decline in line with its carbon budget. So if more gas is produced by fracking, less can be imported.

There is some flexibility. In particular, more gas could be used if the carbon dioxide produced when it is burned is captured and stored. But massive investment would be required, and the UK government for one is not prepared to pay for it. It recently cancelled a major carbon capture and storage project.

The third condition is that the UK’s overall greenhouse gas emissions remain in line with the carbon budget, which means making deeper cuts elsewhere if fracking does go ahead.

The issue here is that there are emissions associated with the production of gas, not just its consumption. If gas is produced in the UK, rather than imported, these emissions count against the UK’s overall budget rather than another country’s.

If emissions in other sectors are not cut as fast as required, it is very unlikely that there would be scope for additional emissions from shale gas, the report states.

But the fact is that the UK is already veering off the course it needs to follow to meet its 2050 target, according to the committee’s progress reports. In other words, barring some dramatic change there is already no scope for additional emissions from shale gas.

 

Read more: Should the UK frack for gas?

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