Should we be worried about Mr Egan?
We are starting to get concerned about the welfare of Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla.
We have noted before that there seems to be something going around locally which makes people forget things that they said recently and then say something which contradicts it shortly afterwards. Our MP, Mark Menzies, had a bout of this mystery ailment when he forgot that the regulatory panel he called for was supposed to be independent and congratulated himself on more than one occasion on being responsible for the decidedly non-independent OFFUGO.
Now Mr Egan seems to have forgotten that the reason why they won’t be drilling this year at Anna’s Road is Cuadrilla’s new-found commitment to responsibility, as evinced by their decision to do a proper Environmental Impact Assessment at Anna’s Road, as he is quoted in the the Garstang Courier today as saying
“…the delays announced last week had hampered its ambitions but insisted the company would do “whatever it takes” to get approval to extract 200 trillion cubic feet of gas.
You’ll have to forgive us if we find it strange that he describes something he is persuading us he is doing voluntarily, and out of sense of what is right, is now hampering his ambitions. And surely even Mr Egan knows that he hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell of extracting 200 tcf of gas from a field which he says contains that amount as a total resource, with recovery rates estimated at around 20%. He’s really not doing very well recently with his PR stuff.
The article is at http://www.garstangcourier.co.uk/news/environment/fracking-on-hold-as-new-sites-planned-1-5512221
In the same piece local hairdresser, IoD bigwig and self-styled fracking expert, John Kersey, bewails the fact that insistence on regulation is going to mean that 1,300 jobs a year for a decade might be missed out on. Given that even Cuadrilla’s most optimistic projections don’t suggest more than 6,500 jobs lasting at most for a decade, we wonder why Mr Kersey thinks we stand to lose twice that many, and why he feels it appropriate to suggest that controls put in place to protect the local population should be ignored on the basis of this highly questionable figure. Perhaps he’s been applying to much volumising shampoo?
