17 pads in Lancashire? Really?
Our friends over at Backing Fracking have been in PR overdrive again. This time they are trying to do some maths but they haven’t really thought it through. Desperate to show that fracking might create some jobs, but having very little to base it on, they have had to rely on the IoD report.
This has forced them to do some pretty bizarre data allocation including this gem.
In Lancashire, where Cuadrilla, Osprey Oil and Gas, Warwick Energy, Aurora Energy Resources and Hutton Energy have licence blocks, we might see 18 sites developed consisting of 720 horizontal wells.
So they are trying to tell us that in all of the Lancashire PEDLs (pictured below) the industry only plan a total of 17 well pads.
Apart from the fact Cuadrilla is on record as saying they plan between 80-100 well pads for Cuadrilla’s PEDL alone (which makes a bit of a mockery of Backing Fracking’s “maths” here) if there really were to be only 17 well pads in Lancashire then, using the IoD figures which Backing Fracking’s article clearly endorses, they would only be able to extract 2.3 TCF of gas from the whole of Lancashire.
This is a little strange given that Cuadrilla have claimed there is between 200 and 300 tcf of gas in place n PEDL 165 alone and that they can extract 10% of it. And the idea that it would be worth fracking Lancashire for 30 years to get about 8 months annual UK gas demand shows how ridiculous the fracking PR machine really is.
No why would they want us to believe that there might be only a fraction of the number of pads that the industry would really need? The 20 TCF Cuadrilla say they can get out of just one licence area – PEDL 165 – would require 160 x 40 well pads at the IoD’s 3.2 bcf EUR. And they expect us to believe that thee would be just 17 pads in all 8 PEDL areas in Lancashire? Really?
Is it stupidity or are they trying to hide the real impacts?
