There is a limit to how long the Scottish Government can delay the biggest energy and industrial policy decision that it faces and for which no buck is available to pass. To frack or not to frack, that is the question?
South of the border, the bullet of high principle has been bitten with the decision to allow Ineos to pursue gas at Roseacre Wood. Meanwhile, Scotland remains locked into an extended cycle of consultations with an outcome vaguely anticipated for some point next year.
Yet delay only compounds the problem of being required to make a difficult decision which will create an outraged furore of one kind or another. The consultation now underway is not going to throw up anything new since the technology is well understood and the global exemplars are available for all to study.
Indeed, the main change since the latest consultation began has been the arrival of US shale gas at Grangemouth for the extraction of ethane and the manufacture of pellets to be used in the chemical industry. Until that tanker arrived in September, the gas had come from the North Sea. So the ethical issue has been compounded rather than simplified. If it is wrong to produce our own shale gas, is it equally reprehensible to import it from the United States? Friends of the Earth certainly think so, denouncing the shipment as “completely unacceptable”.
Their complaint is that the gas is being used “to prop up Ineos’s petrochemicals plants on the back of human suffering and environmental destruction across the Atlantic”. That’s plain enough.
However, many people – not least those who work there – think it rather important to “prop up” Grangemouth, which is central to much of the Scottish economy and equates to three per cent of our GDP.
Loosely translated, all this confirms that delay does not make the problem any easier to resolve. Ineos are quite capable of turning the screw a lot harder and making domestic gas extraction a condition of continued investment at Grangemouth.
And anyway, if shale gas is being used there, why should it not create Scottish jobs in areas of high unemployment and traditional industry?
Faced with such dilemmas, the best policy for government is to follow the science. Blanket bans are difficult to escape from once set in place.
They encourage debates to polarise, which is exactly what has happened with the Scottish fracking issue. When the argument stops being scientific, it inevitably becomes political – requiring a calculation rather than an evidence-based outcome.
The Scottish Government had the chance to follow the safer, scientific route in 2013 when it established an Independent Expert Scientific Panel to report on “the scientific evidence relating to unconventional oil and gas”. Critically, however, “the remit of the Expert Scientific Panel did not include making recommendations to the Scottish Government”.
That was a pity since it deprived the Scottish Government of the ability to take a political decision based on the advice of its own appointed experts. At which point, the debate returned to the inevitable swirl of prejudice, half-baked “facts” and allegations of vested interest and blackmail. That is the unattractive alternative to following the science.
Possibly the key paragraph in the Expert Scientific Panel’s report stated: “There are a number of technical challenges associated with unconventional hydrocarbon extraction, though it is (our) view that none of these are insurmountable. The technology exists to allow the safe extraction of such reserves, subject to robust regulation being in place”.
If the panel had been allowed to make recommendations, it is pretty clear that their crucial advice would have been a variation of that paragraph: allow it to proceed in principle; the technology exists to do it safely; but of course there must be tough regulation. The current consultation will doubtless throw up many people who rabidly disagree with that conclusion, but it will not change the evidence.
The threat to Grangemouth is inescapable. Even in 2014, the Expert Panel noted that the US gas boom meant “the sudden lack of competitiveness from European petrochemical plants where feedstock prices can now be double those of rival plants making identical products in the US”. Unless “low-cost imports can be achieved”, the future for these plants would be “challenging”.
In the short term, the tankers arriving in the Firth of Forth will provide the low-cost imports. They are the product of a £1.6billion investment by Ineos to form a “virtual pipeline” across the Atlantic beween the US and the UK and Norway.
Ineos, however, is insistent that the longer-term prospects for Grangemouth (and other plants) are inextricably linked to domestic production. They are conducting their own hearts and minds campaign in central Scotland, with very substantial community benefits on offer.
The decision facing the Scottish Government goes beyond even these substantial issues. It is essentially about whether we still see ourselves as an industrial nation which is prepared to get its hands dirty to create jobs and prosperity.
The Expert Scientific Panel concluded that “social and environmental impacts can be mitigated if they are carefully considered at the planning application stage”, alongside existing legislative safeguards.
Such safeguards will never be enough for those who are irreconcilably opposed to fracking in any shape or form. Yet Scotland must consider the implications for its economic future if such opposition can drown out all other voices.
We already have an energy policy based on fantasy about the ability of renewables to compensate for loss of other generating sources, turning us into massive importers of power, without creating significant employment.
It may be that we can run an economy on the basis of banning things and then importing them instead from elsewhere, but it will not do much for that gaping deficit in Scotland’s balance sheet. As far as fracking is concerned, the only certainty is that delaying the fundamental decision has already made it more divisive and difficult than if it had been taken sooner.
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