UKOOG’s second movement

When is a “truck movement” one movement and when is it two movements?

Well it’s one movement when you want to convince people fracking won’t have as much impact as it really will.

Thus, in the Institute of Directors’ report “Getting Shale Gas Working” we see figures for truck movements which are now quoted on the UKOOG web site (after they have corrected the text from it’s original rather bizarre claim of less than one truck movement a day per pad)

We can now read that we can expect up to 17.1 “truck movements” a day per pad, but they are not clear as to whether that means 17 return journeys (i.e counting in and out as one movement) or 17 total journeys (an average of 8.5 return journeys a day). As we argue here we believe even this figure to be understated.

It’s not hard to work out whether they mean one return or two single journeys by inference – the IoD report uses an assumption of 30m3 capacity lorries, says a shale gas well will only use 13,590m3 of water for fracturing fluid and will require 453 “truck movements”. Unless they expect the lorries not to leave the site after offloading then each “truck movement” in UKOOG’s terms is therefore actually 2 truck movements. One in and one out.

Now to me, as a local resident each time a truck went past my house, or got in front of me on a windy country road, I would consider that a separate “movement”, so from that point of view you’d not have 17 truck journeys passing your house but 34, which I think is an important distinction.

I have written to UKOG asking them to be clearer about this on their web site and will update here when they respond.