LANCASHIRE DRILLING:ON A DARK, wet November night, Singleton is a quiet village with just a few cars parked at the Miller's Arms, but beneath the surface divisions have been exposed between people who have lived alongside each other for decades.
Last January exploration company Cuadrilla Resources began to erect a drilling rig half a mile from the village, much of which is owned by the Singleton Trust set up in 2004 after a bequest from a local estate owner Richard Dumbreck, who dreamed of a self-sustaining, thriving community.
The rig was soon hidden behind banks of earth, although the lights at night could be seen by curious villagers. The company had permission from Lancashire County Council to conduct drilling, but few of the villagers had been aware of the company’s impending arrival. However, concerns among some – but far from all, it must be acknowledged – began to rise when lorry traffic from the site increased.
The test bore in Singleton was one of five carried out so far by Cuadrilla, although it was forced to stop in the summer after a high-pressure injection of water at nearby Preese Hall, along with chemicals and sand, caused two underground tremors.
Cuadrilla, currently barred from drilling because of the tremors, insists the “seismic activity” was caused by a unique set of local circumstances unlikely to happen again and is not a cause for concern.
The company has promised much. The shale in the Bowland Basin beneath Lancashire, it says, could hold as much as 5.6 trillion cubic metres of gas – enough to “fill more than 60 million Albert Halls”, as it has been colloquially put.
If Cuadrilla had been met by inertia, along with some concern in Singleton and at the other test bores in Weeton, Hesketh Bank and Grange Hall Road, the situation turned after the April and June tremors, the largest of which measured 2.3 on the Richter scale.
“I was jolted out of sleep, completely woken. It felt like metal cracking on something. Sure, some people did sleep through it, but most people felt it,” says Caroline Murphy, who lives in Millers Crescent in Singleton.
Phil Mitchell from the Green Party in Blackpool was not surprised, insisting he had warned beforehand of the danger of tremors – although it is clear he is not yet leading a mass movement against the project. “It’s beginning,” he insisted, however.
“Over 200 people turned up at a meeting in Hesketh Bank and fired questions at Cuadrilla executives. They got answers, but I think they went home unsatisfied. The people there are more organised.”
Fracking has been controversial in parts of the United States, where it is now banned in two states, while the French and a Swiss canton have taken a similar view. Equally, it has proven to be a welcome source of income for many landowners in the US, such as farmers in Pennsylvania.
If resumed and if found to be successful, the Cuadrilla drilling so far will be just the start, since the Tyndall Centre, a climate-change research body, argues that up to 3,000 wells spread over up to 400 square kilometres could be needed to harvest the gas.
Local support, however, in the UK will be harder to generate, since mineral rights are held by the crown, not by the landowner above, even if they would benefit from selling or renting the land needed to exploit them.
So far Cuadrilla has hired between five and seven people from around the Blackpool area. Consultants hired by the company argue that up 1,700 jobs could be created locally, along with £130 million in business rates if production begins.
The prospect of jobs and a boost to the local economy versus the environmental fears has created opposing camps.
“A lot of people in the village have fallen out about the whole thing,” Ms Murphy said.
In early November, Cuadrilla sent letters addressed to “The Householder” to every home in the village promising to offer advance warning of any future tremors – using a “traffic light” system already in use in Germany and the Netherlands. The system would “ensure that any seismic activity triggered by fracking, however unlikely, can be managed to prevent any notable impact”, while the ones that have occurred were two miles underground and “well below” the strength needed to cause damage on the surface.
Villager Derek Holt, however, is one of many in Singleton who does not want to see Cuadrilla return if it is given permission to resume work by the UK’s department for energy and climate and the British Geological Survey.
Like others he had not understood the scale of the operation before it began. “People did not think that it was going to be as big as it was. We thought that they were just going to do soil samples and such.”
He insists that he began to suffer from respiratory problems shortly after the drilling by the “Cape Canaveral-type rig” began, he said.
“I don’t smoke, but I felt like I did. Other people did too. One woman told me that she had it, but didn’t want to cause a fuss.”
Cuadrilla has told villagers that the chance of a repeat of the tremors is “very small”, while, if they did happen, they would be unlikely to exceed 3 on the Richter scale, roughly equivalent to a train passing near by. Water quality is assured because the “Manchester Marl” – an impenetrable rock formation – lies between the shale and the aquifers.
However, some are not convinced and they do not want Cuadrilla back even if they accept that locals are poorly organised and divided.
“Bigger communities might organise better, but we are so scattered,” Holt said. “But it could change if we hear that they are coming back. I certainly don’t want to see them again.”
In his lifetime in the village Dumbreck strove to preserve it as a community, spending money on building new houses, offering reasonable rents on properties to families with young children, while encouraging farmers.
Today his legacy, the Singleton Trust, is in the black and is now considering offering a helping hand with fees, apprenticeships or travel to the village’s young “to get them started in life”, it told villagers in June.
Undoubtedly shale gas would help, but it comes at a price.
