It's necessary to really read some statements
Here, about more gas not lowering prices for example:
Producing more UK gas ‘won’t bring down prices’
Oh well, that settles it then. The Times has said so. No point in fracking now, is there?
Except read more carefully:
Maximising North Sea oil and gas production is crucial for security of supply, but it will have only a “limited” impact on prices, the industry’s lobby group has said.
That’s talking about North Sea production, not fracking. And no, the two will not be the same in their effects. For if they were then the American price of gas would not currently be below the European - which, of course, it is. What matters is the volume of gas produced as against the capacity of the pipelines to export it.
Full throttle fracking would overwhelm export ability so UK prices would be lower than the Continent - just as American are now. And why would North Sea producers want the price of what they can sell - North Sea gas being entirely substituitable with fracked gas - to decline domestically?
There’s also this:
Offshore Energies UK is backing wholesale power market reform that would prevent electricity from wind, solar and nuclear plants being sold at high prices set by gas-fired power plants. But it pushed back on the idea of reform to the gas market to cap the price of domestically produced gas and prevent it being sold at high prices set by the international market.
We bet they say that. For reducing the price of electricity from other sources will increase the price that must be paid for gas. High prices limit, reduce, demand. Lower prices for those alternative generation methods and, ineluctably, demand does not decrease. Raising the price of gas derived electricity, therefore gas itself. But, obviously, they also don’t want to be prevented from taking a higher international price if there is one.
It’s often necessary to work out who is saying it, not just what is being said. For only when we grasp the who - and therefore the why they’re saying it - can we fully grasp the detail of what is being said.
As Ms. Keeler said in one of those great insights into politics and human behaviour “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”