Francis Egan – An apology

We feel we may have given the impression that Francis Egan was trying to mislead listeners in his radio interview with Radio Lancashire this morning. However, it has been pointed out to us that we may have been traducing a philanthropic benefactor.

Listening again to the interview we can confirm that he did make these two statements:

Well the total market value, so if you just take 10 % of the gas that’s in the ground and you multiply it by today’s gas price, the wholesale gas price not the gas price that you and I pay which is a lot higher than the wholesale gas price, it’s about £140 billion worth of gas, that’s just 10% of the gas that’s in the ground and we use that as what we believe is a reasonable conservative estimate of how much of the gas in the ground we might be able to get out of the ground.

and

The actual spend on any development itself would run into several hundred billions, most of which , we would hope would be spent in Lancashire.

We now realise, having looked at those quotes again, that Cuadrilla plan to run their shale gas extraction business at a loss as a service to UK PLC. It looks even more self-sacrificing if you use a more realistic recovery figure like 6%!

We therefore apologise unreservedly to Mr Egan for suggesting that his figure of “several hundred billions” might have been an exaggeration and we salute his community spirit. Perhaps the Queen might see her way to offering him a Geldof in return for his services to the poor

And with those sorts of numbers as a contribution to our economy, the £100,000 a development well and 1.4 billion as 1% of revenues look small beer. I think we can ignore them really.

What do you mean you already did?