British Village Protests Plan for Shale Gas Drilling

What brought them together on Thursday evening, though, was not a spring fair but deep worry. Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, is on the verge of drilling an exploratory oil well just down the road. Villagers see it as a possible precursor to the environmentally controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

“Don’t frack my future,” read the children’s T-shirts as the youths munched on chocolate cupcakes.

The villagers “are going through the grief process; they have just been told they have cancer,” said Alison Stevenson, chairwoman of the Balcombe Parish Council, a local government body. A recent survey conducted by the parish council found that more than 80 percent of the 284 respondents wanted the council to oppose fracking.

The protest was in keeping with the steady resistance that oil and gas companies, and the governments that approve their exploration, are facing as they try to tap underground rock deposits in populated areas to extract fossil fuels. The Balcombe site is limestone, but Cuadrilla and energy companies elsewhere are using similar drilling techniques in efforts to produce oil and natural gas from shale rock.

Although shale gas extraction has created an energy boom in the United States, many Europeans have been reluctant to accept the technology on concerns that it could contaminate groundwater and encourage continued reliance on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Balcombe, with about 1,800 residents, is no hotbed of radicalism. It is in the Conservative Party’s heartland, about a half-hour’s train ride south of London. It is represented in Parliament by Francis Maude, a cabinet minister.

But residents say their opposition to fracking, the process of pumping large quantities of liquid, sand and other substances to release gas trapped inside rocks, is not being heard in official circles.

“This is naturally a very conservative, wealthy village,” said Lawrence Dunne, a physics professor who lives here. “But we feel the government is completely ignoring us.”

On this evening, Cuadrilla, the company that is spearheading shale gas development in Britain, was trying to listen. In a former church known as Bramble Hall, the company held a “drop-in session” for local residents.

Several Cuadrilla executives accompanied by an entourage of public relations aides talked to small groups of residents, who were joined by environmental activists from London and the surrounding area.

Francis Egan, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, called the gathering, which attracted more than 200 people and lasted more than four hours, “really, really valuable.” The encounter gave people “an opportunity to hear from us what we are doing” rather than what they “read on the Internet,” he said.

He and other European business leaders who advocate shale gas development are envious of the head start achieved by their American counterparts. But they know that on this side of the Atlantic, fears of pollution run so deep in the grass roots that local and national politicians are hesitant to endorse drilling.

France has a ban on fracking, and Germany is unlikely to give it a green light until after the coming elections. The British government views shale gas as a possible replacement for the declining energy reserves in the North Sea, but those intentions have been slow to translate into action. It is unlikely that there will be any shale gas fracking in Britain this year.

On Thursday, Balcombe was a microcosm of European concerns. Many minds seemed already set against the energy company — a result, some local people said, of heavy campaigning by opponents of fracking.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred erroneously to the type of exploratory well Cuadrilla Resources, a proponent of shale gas development, intends to drill in Balcombe, England. It is an oil well, not a shale gas well — although the drilling techniques that may be employed are the same ones energy companies typically use to extract shale gas.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/business/global/british-village-protests-plan-for-shale-gas-drilling.html?partner=rss&emc=rss