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‘Desperate’ court challenge to stop fracking in Lancashire

Fracking due to begin next week
Cuadrilla says its fracking site near Blackpool is the most heavily monitored oil and gas facility in the world
DANNY LAWSON/PA

A shale gas company plans to resume fracking next week, seven years after the process was temporarily banned for causing minor earthquakes.

A High Court judge made an interim order yesterday that fracking should not take place at Cuadrilla’s site on Preston New Road near Blackpool before a full injunction application is heard next Wednesday. Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla, said: “It’s a desperate attempt to delay us, but I’m confident this is going to go ahead.”

Campaigners claim that Lancashire council’s plans for evacuating homes and 15 schools within three miles of the site are inadequate. Nick Danby, a retired civil servant from nearby Inskip who was among 25 protesters outside the site, said Cuadrilla was “on its best behaviour now”, but he feared safety standards could slip if more fracking sites were developed.

Barbara Richardson, from Roseacre, where Cuadrilla is applying to frack, opposed fracking partly because of the 15,000 lorry movements needed per site on narrow lanes.

The company plans to spend the next three months hydraulically fracturing two wells by pumping water, sand and polyacrylamide at high pressure to crack open the shale layer one and a half miles below the surface.

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It should know by Easter whether shale gas production will match British Geological Survey estimates that extracting only a tenth of the gas in shale rock beneath northern England would meet Britain’s gas needs for 40 years.

Mr Egan said the site was the most heavily monitored oil and gas site in the world, with dozens of devices checking for seismic activity and water, air and noise pollution.

The government appointed the former Labour MP Natascha Engel as the first “commissioner for shale gas” yesterday. She said that she would work to ensure people had “impartial information”.

Labour has vowed to ban fracking. Ms Engel was MP for North East Derbyshire between 2005 and 2017. She has worked since then as an adviser to Ineos, which has plans for shale gas drilling in Yorkshire, the east Midlands and Cheshire.

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