LONDON — On Aug. 1, six friends drove a 1970s-era fire engine to the village of Balcombe, south of London, and used it to block the entrance of a site where Cuadrilla Holdings, a leader in the fledgling British shale gas industry, was about to commence drilling.

Eventually, the police arrested the group and impounded the vehicle, which some of the protesters had bought for the occasion.

“It was the first time I had been arrested,” one of the protesters, Lu Brown, said by telephone. “It was completely fine. The officers were quite nice.”

Ms. Brown said her group wanted to stop exploitation of shale gas in Britain because it risked polluting the water and “industrializing the countryside.”

She also said that polls have found that “80 percent of the people of Balcombe” are against the project.

“Corporate interests are being put over people,” said Ms. Brown, who works as a paralegal in London. “We want to help the people of Balcombe and prevent the industry from taking off in the U.K.”

Balcombe has in recent days become a focal point for environmental campaigners from the West Sussex area as well as from around Britain. Small groups have camped near the site, while during the warm summer days the scene has turned into a carnival of protest.

As of Monday, there had been 36 arrests, according to Andy Freeman, a spokesman for the Sussex police.

Shale gas, which in North America has increased natural gas supplies and helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has given rise to great anxiety in Europe, where there are environmental concerns, including fears that the extraction process may pollute groundwater.

One could argue that the activists are overplaying their hand in Balcombe. The main aims of the protests are to prevent shale gas drilling and particularly hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — the injection of large quantities of water and sand into the ground under high pressure to break up rock formations to release trapped natural gas.

Yet Caudrilla is drilling in Balcombe for oil, not natural gas, and says it has no plans to use fracking at the well. The protesters do not seem concerned with such details.

Britain is probably the West European country most well-disposed toward shale gas exploitation, yet activists can take comfort in the stuttering start the industry has made there.

Cuadrilla’s main focus has been on Lancashire in the northwest, where it stumbled badly in 2011 when hydraulic fracturing set off minor earthquakes. Since then, the company has been largely stymied in its efforts to continue the work, though the government has given a cautious green light to fracking and Cuadrilla is once again preparing to move ahead.

What’s puzzling is why Cuadrilla is expending its energy on an oil-drilling site in southeast England when it says it has identified an enormous resource — an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet, or 5.6 trillion cubic meters, of natural gas — under land it leases in the northwest of the country.

Just 10 percent of that total would more than double Britain’s current natural gas reserves. And because natural gas burns cleaner than coal, whose use in power generation has been rising in Britain, Cuadrilla’s find could help the country reduce its emissions, a government priority.

But no one will know how much if any gas can be commercially exploited until many wells — perhaps 30 to 50 — are drilled and tested.

Sinking those wells may take a long time, given the pace so far. Along with Cuadrilla, analysts fault the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for not making a strong enough case for natural gas extraction, although London has offered some tax cuts and other incentives.

“The government and the company don’t get it,” said Paul Stevens, an energy expert at Chatham House, a London research organization.

In one sense, the activists’ choice to make a stand in Balcombe has been shrewd. The little village is an easy trip for the London news media and a picturesque illustration of what might be spoiled by oil and gas drilling.

It is also situated in the heartland of Mr. Cameron’s Conservative constituency, and so protests there may be heeded more closely than any arising in the northern part of the country.

The Balcombe drama also highlights the divide between the country’s wealthy southeast and its poorer north, the site of much of what little drilling has been carried out so far.

David Howell, a prominent Tory spokesman on energy matters, drew fire when he said on July 30 that “there are large, uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly in parts of the north-east, where there is plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence, and where it could be conducted without any threat to the rural environment.”

The drama playing out in Balcombe won’t encourage the big oil and gas companies to put their money on shale gas in Britain, or in Western Europe. On a conference call with reporters on Aug. 1, Simon Henry, chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell, noted that he had said months before that Shell “didn’t want to be in the headlines every day” by drilling for shale gas in Britain.

Given the fuss at Balcombe, “that was probably a good call,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/business/energy-environment/08iht-green08.html?partner=rss&emc=rss