Oral evidence: Environmental risks of fracking, HC 856Wednesday 14 January 2015
Oral evidence, 14 January 2015.
Witnesses
Lord Chris Smith, Chair of Task Force on Shale Gas, and Steve Thompsett, Director, UK Onshore Oil & Gas, gave evidence.
Chair
Thanking you, Lord Smith and Mr Thompsett, for coming along this afternoon. I think that you have sat in throughout the session we have just had and I am sure that you will be aware that we may well be constrained by the Division bell. I will ask each of you very quickly to share with the Committee what the objective and purpose of the organisation that you represent is, starting with you, Lord Smith.
Lord Smith
Chair, thank you very much. I chair the relatively newly created Task Force on Shale Gas. The purpose of the task force is to try to reach an independent view for the public on a range of public concerns and issues relating to fracking and shale gas. The funding for the task force comes from six companies, all engaged in the shale gas industry, but—and this is a very crucial point—they have guaranteed the independence of the task force itself. They can have no influence on what we decide to have a look at or what we say. We started our work in September. Our intention is to issue a series of interim reports over an 18-month period and a final report in the early part of 2016. We will be looking at a range of issues. The first cluster of issues we are looking at currently is what I would call the local impact issues about the operation of the planning system, community engagement, lorry movements and disturbance and disruption. The second cluster of issues we will be looking at is local environmental impacts. That is the potential issues about groundwater contamination, what happens to waste fluids, methane escapes and so forth. The third cluster of issues will be the much broader environmental issues about climate change impact and what the development of a shale gas industry here in the UK would mean for our carbon footprint in both the short term and the long term. The fourth cluster of issues we will be looking at, perhaps particularly pertinent now, is the economic issues: does this make economic sense for the provision of energy but also for the UK as a whole, and also what are the local economic impacts for jobs and the local economy? That is the spread of issues that we are looking at. We are very early days yet, so a lot of what I suspect I will have to say is, “We are looking at that” rather than that we have come to any particular conclusions.
Chair
Thank you. Mr Thompsett, just a very brief summary in respect of UK Onshore Oil & Gas, please.
Steve Thompsett
I am a director at UK Onshore Oil & Gas. I am an environmental scientist, just to be clear on that. I am not an economist or an expert in the drilling process. I have a background in dealing with water-related environmental issues, going back some 20 years. In UKOOG I spend a lot of time working with the operators in the industry to bring forward a coherent approach to how we as an industry represent environmental issues.
Caroline Lucas
The first question is about climate change. To what extent do both of you believe that fracking is compatible with the UK’s climate change commitments?
Steve Thompsett
I think the challenge here is that we need gas as a country. You have to recognise that about 83% of homes are heated by gas and 25% or thereabouts of our electricity is generated by gas, but gas is also very important for a number of things beyond energy. We use gas as a key component in the manufacturing of fertiliser and to manufacture many other products. I think it is very important that we recognise that gas is needed.
Caroline Lucas
Sorry, just to be slightly provocative, surely the first thing we need to make sure is that we have a liveable planet that is not undermined by climate change and then we can work out how much gas is compatible with that rather than start, as you just have, with how we need gas and therefore how we are going to produce it.
Steve Thompsett
Yes, but I think we have to put all things in perspective and gas is part of our energy mix. Coal is considerably more challenging in terms of its carbon input so we have an opportunity with gas to push some of the coal out of our system.
Caroline Lucas
Could I just challenge you on that? We had evidence this morning that was suggesting that by the time shale gas comes online in any significant quantities, 2025, that is exactly the time when we need to be decarbonising, getting coal off our grid, so by that time it is not actually displacing coal. It has a much stronger likelihood of displacing renewables, which is not so good.
Steve Thompsett
I guess there are many angles to take on this but—
Chair
Are you disputing that?
Steve Thompsett
Am I disputing it? No, I don’t believe so. I believe gas will have a role to play.
Caroline Lucas
You did just say that it was going to displace coal and that is what I was—
Steve Thompsett
Not all of coal. It would help contribute to the displacement of coal but not its entirety, I am sure. We will still need gas in a lot of the activities we undertake.
Lord Smith
This is precisely one of the issues that we will be looking at later on this year and we will be seeking evidence from a wide range of sources on it. The issue has to be our aim for carbon and climate change as a country is that we should have decarbonised our electricity supply completely by 2050. There are issues about domestic heating and cooking that have not yet been fully addressed in the climate change objectives. The question will have to be: how do we make the best progress from where we are now to there? That will involve issues about what happens to coal, what the balance between domestically produced shale gas and imported gas from elsewhere around the world is in terms of carbon impacts, issues about the stimulus to renewables or a deterrent to renewables, and issues about whether carbon capture and storage is seriously going to develop. Those are all parts of the equation that we will want to include in the analysis that we make.
Caroline Lucas
Would you accept that at the earliest, in terms of making a significant contribution to our energy use, it will be around 2025? Is that about the earliest that we could see significant shale gas coming on?
Lord Smith
In terms of significant quantities of shale gas production, I suspect you are probably right in that assessment. I would imagine that if all the relevant planning and environmental considerations are met there will probably be some shale gas development happening a bit before then, but for any really significant impact I think that is probably a fair assessment.
Caroline Lucas
That is just five years from 2030 when, according to DECC, most domestic heating should be on a low carbon grid, in other words DECC is at the same time, it seems to me, being somewhat inconsistent. On the one hand it is saying by 2030 we want to have most domestic heating on a low carbon grid and yet basically saying we would be having a thriving shale gas industry for five years and then it would have to stop.
Lord Smith
This would not be the first time that a Government Department has been inconsistent.
Caroline Lucas
That does not fill me with a great deal of reassurance, I have to say. Could I ask you about stranded assets and the carbon bubble? You will know that there is more and more research suggesting that we need to leave anything up to about 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we are to have any hope of avoiding the most dangerous climate change. If you accept that—and maybe you can say if you do first—how is that compatible with launching a whole new fracking industry?
Lord Smith
Again, that is one of the factors that we will be seriously studying. One of the issues that we will need to try to analyse is what kind of carbon are you leaving in the ground. One of the perverse consequences at the moment of the development of shale gas in the United States is that it has dramatically reduced the United States’ dependence on coal. That has led to the United States offloading its coal cheaply around the rest of the world, which has increased the use of coal, including here in the UK. We are currently burning more coal than we have burned for decades in the generation of our electricity. If it is a case of extracting gas rather than extracting coal, then that may be beneficial in terms of carbon resources, but if it is a case of extracting gas when you could be developing renewables then it would not necessarily be the same.
Caroline Lucas
But would you accept that the former of those two scenarios is by the far the most likely if we are accepting that we are not going to have significant shale gas coming on stream until 2025. By the time we have got to that point it will not be likely to be coal that you are substantially replacing. It is more likely to be renewables.
Lord Smith
A lot of our coal-fired power stations will have been phased out by then.
Caroline Lucas
Exactly. That is my point. You will not be displacing coal at that point, so you will be displacing renewables.
Lord Smith
The calculation that you need to make—and remember this should not just apply here in the UK; we need to be looking at what is happening in the rest of the world as well—is what the circumstances are going to be not just now, not just in 10 years’ time but what is going to happen in 25 years’ time and beyond.
Caroline Lucas
Exactly, but that seems to me to be reinforcing my point that it is far more likely that shale will be displacing renewables rather than coal. Would you agree? Yes or no would be really handy.
Lord Smith
No, because the imperative on the growing development of renewables has to be a sine qua non of energy policy.
Caroline Lucas
In the new Infrastructure Bill there is a duty to maximise economic recovery of oil and gas, fossil fuels essentially. To what extent do you think that is compatible with our climate change objectives?
Lord Smith
I have to say that is not an issue that will be the subject of debate by the task force. If you want a personal view, it is that it is potentially a dangerous addition to a piece of legislation.
Neil Carmichael
It is not surprising that the industry is fairly optimistic about the possibilities of shale gas and it clearly has thought about the implications, both good and bad. Steve, what do you think are the main threats and main concerns that the industry has in mind?
Steve Thompsett
The main threats to the development of the industry?
Neil Carmichael
Yes.
Steve Thompsett
A main threat to the development of the industry is establishing a social licence to operate, and we have heard that mentioned as quite a fundamental thing for the industry to achieve. That is only achieved by being transparent and open and establishing a strong threshold for baseline environmental information so that people can see that it is an industry that can work in the UK and with the environment. I would see that as perhaps one of the bigger challenges.
Neil Carmichael
What do you think can go wrong environmentally with shale gas?
Steve Thompsett
Under the current permitting and regulatory arrangements not very much, if we are honest. I think there are the controls and mechanisms in place that enable the industry to operate effectively and efficiently and in an environment that is well regulated and well controlled. I don’t actually believe that there are fundamental issues that can arise.
Neil Carmichael
But you must do some risk analysis. You must have a worst case scenario situation. What kind of scenarios or what kind of risks would you set out?
Steve Thompsett
Like any industrial activity, there is always a risk of maybe a spill on the surface or some component needing to be maintained, a small failure or a small issue. If you think that we have had a well established onshore oil industry for many years, with very few environmental issues associated with it, that kind of puts the context in which we are able to regulate oil and gas onshore in the UK.
Neil Carmichael
If you had a bottomless pit of research capacity, where would you go in terms of pushing o
Steve Thompsett
It is a very interesting question. We already have a framework of monitoring and various elements that come together to ensure that the industry is well controlled, so I am not sure you would target money at any particular element. You perhaps would look at maybe modifying and improving the best available techniques such that you have a framework that is able to capture the information from each site, but I think that there is probably not one panacea that would unlock the environmental monitoring requirements.
Neil Carmichael
Chris, is your task force thinking about this sort of issue?
Lord Smith
We are definitely thinking about this sort of issue. We will probably need to do some thinking above and beyond the existing level of research, partly because a lot of the existing research is from the American experience and the circumstances in America are different in terms of geology, regulatory regime and landscape. We have a much more crowded island here in the UK. One of the areas where I think the issues are going to be most stark is in relation to well integrity, because it is so important. Well integrity is so crucial for protection in terms of groundwater, waste fluids and impact on the environment; do we have the right regimes and techniques in place to ensure well integrity? That is one set of issues. The other set of issues that I don’t think has been sufficiently researched up to now is in relation to health impacts where there are conflicting bits of research emerging from the United States. In that respect—and I am sticking my neck out a little bit here and probably pre-empting one of the things that we are likely to be looking at—I think personally one of the major important things is baseline monitoring on health for any well development.
Neil Carmichael
The well integrity issue is an important one. The Environment Agency seem to rely quite a lot on existing water permit regimes and so forth. Do you think that is sufficient or do you think there is more needed?
Lord Smith
Again, this is one of the things that we are looking at. If I had to express a personal view, it would be that if you add up the range of environmental regulations that are currently in place, mostly in different European directives, you probably have a range of protections that are sufficient for the various issues that we can currently envisage. However, it is all rather diffuse across a range of different directives and it is the responsibility of a range of different public bodies to undertake the regulation. One of the key issues that we are tussling with at the moment is: does that make sense? Would it be better to have a bespoke regulatory regime that had the expertise, the knowledge and developed it, especially if we are going to see a lot of new applications coming online? At the moment you have only a few handfuls of applications and the current regime appears to be reasonably well geared up to be able to deal with that. If that were to expand dramatically, I think there are serious questions about whether it is.
Neil Carmichael
The capacity issue was looked at before. It is possible, isn’t it, for two regulatory agencies or two structures or whatever to effectively not quite be seen as enough and let something go through? Have we seen that happening in the United States?
Lord Smith
The problem in the United States is that the regulatory regime differs from state to state. Much of the regulation is undertaken by the state authorities rather than by the federal authorities, so it is different from one place to another. Especially in the early days of development in the United States, the regulatory protections were perhaps rather more rudimentary than they are here. I think we can learn a lot from the United States about how not to do it. We can also pick up some bits of best practice and learn how to do it as well.
Neil Carmichael
Do you think the technology behind this industry is mature enough to deal with some of the challenges that you have outlined and, Steve, you are probably thinking about as well?
Steve Thompsett
I believe so. I think the technology is there to enable us to do this very efficiently and effectively. I suppose what we face is whether all of that technology is available on the scale that we may need to apply it. That is where, if we are to do research, maybe looking at particular techniques that may be available for treating water on a site to minimise transport activity, those kinds of things, could add value. The technology is there; it is whether it can be developed and scaled to a level that would enable production.
Lord Smith
A lot of the technology has been deployed in conventional forms of drilling for decades now. I think the application of the technology rather than the technology itself is the thing we need to be seriously looking at.
Martin Caton
Tamboran Resources, operating in Ireland, have pledged zero chemical hydraulic fracturing. Is that possible or economically attractive to the industry?
Steve Thompsett
There is a whole range of techniques that can adopted. It is a case of whether they actually work in the formation that you are looking to stimulate and this is part of the challenge. We are not dealing with shale rock that is the same everywhere and therefore you have to use a range of tools in order to recover the hydrocarbon resources. There is a range of techniques; it is whether they will work where you are currently pursuing it.
Martin Caton
Is alternative technology something your task force would look at?
Lord Smith
I would certainly want to look at what the Irish proposal is and to see how robust it is and whether it could be applied here. I don’t know at the moment because I have not seriously looked at that but I would certainly want to.
Mark Lazarowicz
My question is really for Mr Thompsett. The Government have introduced various tax regimes to encourage fracking and there are obviously the measures in the Infrastructure Bill to make fracking easier as well. How important have these changes been to the industry to allow it to develop fracking in the UK?
Steve Thompsett
It is worth recognising what the tax regimes are. We pay a corporation tax of 30%, which is 9% above what normal industry and other activities pay. Then there is a supplementary tax, which is again another 30%, and it is that that has been packaged together such that there will be some modifications and some benefits that enable the industry to go forward. That is the set up, this supplementary tax.
Mark Lazarowicz
It is about half the tax rate for oil, isn’t it?
Steve Thompsett
As in the supplementary tax?
Mark Lazarowicz
Yes.
Steve Thompsett
It is for Treasury to determine what that threshold is. It would effectively be a reduction of that element. I couldn’t tell you exactly what the number is off the top of my head.
Mark Lazarowicz
It is half as much as oil exploration has to pay.
Steve Thompsett
In the context of offshore?
Mark Lazarowicz
Yes.
Steve Thompsett
I don’t know off the top of my head but maybe it is in that area, yes.
Mark Lazarowicz
How important to the industry are the changes brought in by the Infrastructure Bill? Would fracking go ahead to the same degree without those changes?
Steve Thompsett
I think it probably would go ahead. What we have to recognise is that we are just seeking to stimulate rock at a great depth, which quite obviously has no impact at the surface. I guess we could debate the seismicity issue if we believe that is a major concern. The ability to stimulate and to drill very deep ground that does not impact the benefit of the use of the surface is something that is very useful to a number of industries and not just oil and gas—geothermal for example.
Mark Lazarowicz
As you know, the Government have highlighted both the relative tax advantage and the changes in the Infrastructure Bill as being part of a way of encouraging a shale well revolution in the UK. If that is what they think, presumably you must also think that it makes a great difference to the industry.
Steve Thompsett
In developing an industry, clearly if you want to attract investment you have to make it attractive for the investors to move forward and get involved. But we must remember that the supplementary tax in due course would be removed. It would go back up 30%, not be removed, so we would be paying 60%, and the right time for that would depend very much on how exploration and production progresses. We would expect the Treasury to be looking over our shoulder to determine exactly when the time was right.
Mark Lazarowicz
Give us an idea of how long you would expect the favourable tax rates to apply.
Steve Thompsett
That is very interesting. I guess we would need to do some more exploration and drill some more wells before we get the feeling for how productive UK shale is likely to be. It would no doubt be a number of years. If we consider that production may be five to 10 years away, even at a reasonable scale, then it would be of that sort of timescale. That is a guess, obviously, because we don’t yet have that.
Mark Lazarowicz
So you are talking in the context of many years not just a couple of years?
Steve Thompsett
Yes, but of course we are not subsidised. We do not get a payment from Government in order to develop this.
Chair
You get tax concessions, don’t you?
Steve Thompsett
We get tax concessions but that is only the supplementary element to it. We are not actually producing any gas and selling any gas, until we get to a point where we are producing it.
Mark Lazarowicz
I know it is early stages from your point of view, but have you seen people rushing into the market because of the tax concessions?
Steve Thompsett
We know that a number of big players, Centrica, Total and GDF Suez, have joined us in the last year or so, and of course we have the 14th round and we know that that has been quite attractive and a good number of operators have come through. It has been announced publicly that about 95 operators have come forward for about 295 licensing blocks. There is quite a significant amount of interest, but that is due to be completed in the next few months and we will see the outcomes.
Mark Lazarowicz
I don’t know if you heard the earlier session when I raised a point that had come from the morning evidence session. There were concerns that a lot of the operators potentially had a relatively low equity base, so if anything did go wrong with a particular well they would not have the capacity, bluntly, to necessarily pay to clean up the mess because they did not have many resources. Is that something you accept?
Steve Thompsett
No. I think it is important to recognise the kind of framework that sits around this. In order to become a competent operator and be able to bid for a licence you have to show that you have financial capacity to undertake the operation and explore and do the things you need to do.
Mark Lazarowicz
It is also the clean-up if something went wrong, which is obviously different from the finances for the operation, isn’t it?
Steve Thompsett
I think it is important to look at the framework. We have the licensing arrangements and well consent. DECC would not let well consent, consent to drill, unless the company had the financial rigour to enable that to be undertaken and then the well to be closed out. The Environment Agency has powers to require a certain sort of conditions and enforce those conditions, as we heard in the last session. The Minerals Planning Authority can ask for bonds or financial mechanisms to be established as part of planning conditions. With all that sort of layering in place, it is already fairly robust and of course operators will have environmental liability insurance. UKOOG has been working on a captive mechanism to see if we can make something more collectively cheaper for the industry to be able to buy into to help manage some of these elements. It is already a fairly comprehensive framework at many levels.
Dr Offord
The whole issue of fracking has become very polarised between those who are pro and those who are anti. What steps do you believe that both the Government and the industry should take to introduce a more objective assessment of the pros and cons of the practice?
Lord Smith
I will have a first go at that. One of the problems with this whole debate is that it has tended to polarise too much. Quite a few people in Government and elsewhere are saying that this is going to solve most of our energy problems as a country for decades to come; others in the broader environmental movement are saying that this is an unmitigated environmental disaster. I happen to believe that neither of those two propositions is true. Trying to find where the truth lies in between them is precisely what our task force is going to be seeking to try to establish. What we are going to try to do is be as open as we possibly can about what we are doing, publish everything on our website about the evidence we receive, the reports that we do, the people we have talked with. We have already been to talk with people in Lancashire and West Sussex about their views and concerns. Illumination, transparency and as evidence-based as we can make it is the secret to trying to establish genuine public confidence in what is happening.
Steve Thompsett
I entirely agree. The problem is there have been an awful lot of mixed messages and the public would find it very difficult to understand which of them is correct. The industry, with UKOOG, promoted a discussion campaign called “Let’s talk about shale” and this was undertaken in the north-west. What we found from there is that people really wanted to openly discuss the issues without feeling pressured. We received 800 questions covering different things and what it showed us was that people are willing to engage but they want to engage in a non-confrontational manner, so we didn’t have people from the industry involved. It was purely a go in and you can discuss, write your question down kind of arrangement, and I think it was very well received by the communities and there were very interesting questions that the industry will certainly benefit from.
Dr Offord
What about more wide-scale public consultation? In the last few days I am sure other members here have received e-mails from a campaigning group talking about fracking underneath their homes. The reality is that there will not be fracking in north London, in Hendon in my constituency, but I do accept that people have a concern away from their properties and in other parts of the country. How do you get those people more involved?
Steve Thompsett
I think the challenge is that you need to be able to let them understand what the scale of the activity is and the risks that that potentially poses. We are talking about stimulation at great depth, several thousand metres in some cases, and a process that opens fractures that are a millimetre in size, held open with a grain of sand. We are not talking about drilling a large tunnel or something. I think people don’t fully understand that that is the actual operation itself. Nobody has done a national campaign to say, “This is what it is.”
Caroline Lucas
I can’t speak for other people, but I would have thought that someone hearing you saying that one of the big problems here is that others don’t understand the level of risk is exactly what is going to make them even more annoyed and frustrated. The people that I have met have spent an awful lot of time getting their heads round this stuff and, although some things that some people say might not be true, the vast majority of the analysis that these groups are doing is pretty rigorous stuff. To say that the problem is that they simply do not understand it risks sounding somewhat patronising.
Steve Thompsett
I apologise for that. I didn’t mean it to come across in that way. We need to give people a balanced view from both sides. We need to give people the evidence about the techniques that are undertaken, about what the operation really is, and let them form their own view about whether that is something that they are willing to accommodate in their community.
Caroline Lucas
If we are talking about evidence, does that mean that each of you would be willing—or maybe you already have done—to write to the Government to say that the report on the rural impacts of fracking should be made available now, completely unredacted? If you are talking about things that are going to make people not have confidence in the process, to have a document that has about two-thirds of it redacted is not guaranteed to have that effect. Is that something you could guarantee to do?
Steve Thompsett
No, I don’t think I could guarantee to do that because I don’t think that—
Caroline Lucas
But you want people to have the evidence.
Chair
You just said about transparency.
Steve Thompsett
Yes, but I don’t know the context in which that document was developed, whether it was developed as a discussion piece that could perhaps concern people from a different perspective. I don’t know what the details are of that document. I have not seen it, so it is very difficult for me to comment on whether that should be in the public domain.
Lord Smith
I would very happily say to the Government that openness is absolutely essential and I would say exactly the same to the industry. One of the surprising things that I discovered when we were talking with some of the communities in West Sussex was that in relation to applications for drilling sites, information about, for example, the number and frequency of lorry movements during the well construction stage, the exploration stage and the decommissioning stage was not being openly and clearly made available to local communities. Of course that is precisely the sort of thing that local communities are going to be extremely concerned and worried about and if they don’t have that clarity and information then they are going to draw very obvious conclusions.
Chair
So you would be prepared to write along the lines just suggested by Caroline Lucas, Lord Smith?
Lord Smith
I would certainly be prepared to write to the Government and say, “You must be open about all the information that you have in relation to this subject”.
Dr Offord
In regard to the management of risk that people are concerned about—what if something goes wrong—are the current liability arrangements adequate?
Steve Thompsett
I believe they are, yes.
Chair
On what basis do you say that?
Steve Thompsett
I think the layering of mechanisms that regulators have in place is sufficient. The industry over time will be in a position where it can develop a captive that in fact makes the ability to manage that liability cheaper for the industry. You can buy bonds and insurance mechanisms, but they are currently expensive. If we could get into a position where all industry is able to buy into that and take that forward then that would be a very positive place.
Mark Lazarowicz
In the earlier evidence session most of the discussion has been about the regulatory regime that applies in England, and I think England and Wales, but the actual subject matter of the inquiry is environmental risks of fracking in the UK, so I want to ask a question about the situation in Scotland, in particular to Mr Thompsett but maybe Lord Smith as well if he wishes to comment. What contact and discussions have you had about fracking with the Scottish regulators and with the Scottish Government and what has their response been to your activities?
Steve Thompsett
As with Wales and England, we are engaged with Scotland. We have operators in Scotland who are looking to undertake various things. We have links to SEPA. In fact, only today I shared the industry’s baseline monitoring guidelines, which we developed, with them to initiate some discussion with the industry. We are engaged with them. There is a lot more activity in England so our focus has been fairly significantly in England with the Environment Agency and the other regulators, but we are certainly linked into Scotland as well.
Mark Lazarowicz
What about the Scottish Government? Have you had contact with the Government rather than the agencies?
Steve Thompsett
Yes, we have indeed. We do have an ongoing dialogue with all of the regulators and really it is determined by the level of activity that is going on. Of course we do represent a number of operators that work in Scotland.
Mark Lazarowicz
What has the view been that the Scottish Government have taken about your operations or your plans for the industry?
Steve Thompsett
They engage with us in a similar way as other regulators. They often listen to what we say, feed back on where they think perhaps we need to be doing things in a different way. We have an ongoing dialogue, so there is no particular issue that we deal with on a daily basis.
Mark Lazarowicz
Have the Scottish Government suggested to you, for example, that you should not be doing fracking in Scotland?
Steve Thompsett
Not directly to us as an industry. No, not at all.
Lord Smith
Our primary focus is on England but we will, of course, be wanting, in the course of our work, to look at what is happening in Wales and Scotland, particularly to see if there are cross-border lessons that can usefully be learned.
Mark Lazarowicz
Just to Mr Thompsett again, have you had any discussions directly with Scottish Government Ministers?
Lord Smith
Not yet.
Mark Lazarowicz
Mr Thompsett, any Ministers?
Steve Thompsett
Have I personally?
Mark Lazarowicz
Well, you or your organisation.
Steve Thompsett
Yes. Certainly UKOOG has had an ongoing dialogue with the Scottish Government.
Mark Lazarowicz
Actually with Scottish Government Ministers?
Steve Thompsett
I can’t tell you exactly who it has been discussed with but, yes, members of UKOOG and the industry have engaged with Scotland and the Ministers.
Caroline Lucas
I have one last question. It is where we started off on this one about building trust with the public. When you first introduced the task force you said that it is funded by industry. Notwithstanding as many firewalls as you might put between you and it, do you not accept that by having industry funding rather than public funding you are starting off on the back foot because it gives out a signal to people that this is something that the industry may well have an interest in? I am not suggesting it does but the signal that it gives.
Lord Smith
I entirely accept that, in an ideal world, funding for the sort of work that the task force is undertaking could most usefully come from the public purse. That is not on offer and, given that and given that I think the work is important and that it is for the benefit of the public that it is done, the way in which we have structured the task force, the guarantees of independence that we have and the eminence of the four people who make up the task force I think are the best guarantees that we have.
Caroline Lucas
Could you conceive that theoretically it could come to a position, for example looking at the climate change aspects, of saying, “Fracking is not compatible with our climate change objectives” and it would able, free to make a recommendation as strong as that?
Lord Smith
If that is where the evidence leads us, yes. What I don’t know at the moment is where the evidence is going to lead us.
Chair
We need to draw our proceedings to a close. Thank you for coming along this afternoon and thank you to the Committee as well. Oral evidence: Environmental risks of fracking, HC 856 33