The Anonymous Widower

Russia ‘secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking’

The title of this post is not taken from some right-wing scandal sheet, but from this article in The Guardian.

I have an open mind on fracking, but keep these facts in mind.

• A lot of the bad stories about fracking originate in the United States, where quite frankly a lot of get-rich-quick cowboys got involved in the process, in a manner that would be illegal in the EU and the UK.
• The largest on-shore oil-field in Western Europe is Wytch Farm, which is close to Corfe Castle. I can’t find a report of any environmental damage around this oil-field, since production started in 1979. This proves to me, that we can extract oil and gas safely on-shore over a long period, which in Wytch Farm’s case is without fracking.
• We have some of the best engineering Universities in the world and we should use them to develop better ways of extracting, transporting and processing oil and gas. A big project involving several European universities called SHEER, is looking at fracking on a Polish site.
• Remember that if we need to import gas from outside Europe, we deal with countries with impeccable human rights like Qatar, Russia or the United States.
• Fracking techniques are used in the Highlands of Scotland to extract water out of rock.
• We need a lot of gas to keep us warm in winter.

I may have an open mind, but no-one could deny, that if Western Europe obtained the gas it needs from fracking or perhaps by finding a massive conventional gas field onshore in the UK, that the biggest loser would be Russia and President Putin.

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August 7, 2016 - Posted by AnonW | World | Energy, Fracking, Gas, Russia, Vladimir Putin