Of course fracking will work
The Guardian runs just one of many articles insisting that fracking will not work in Britain. The geology is wrong, it won’t change prices anyway, how dare they and that’s the end of that. We take a more cynical - as always, when viewing politics, we suggest “realist” is the correct description of unbridled cynicism - view of the matter. If fracking really won’t work in Britain then the effort to ban it on those spurious quake grounds would never have been attempted. It is precisely that insistence that it cannot be allowed which convinces us that it will work if it is allowed.
As to price, yes of course increasing supply will reduce prices. By how much is the question and that depends upon the capacity of the infrastructure to feed it out into wider markets. The more that can be exported the less influence there will be on the domestic price.
But leaving the issue there is a logical failure. For gas within the UK belongs to The Crown. Which means that the resource value, the royalties, flows to the government. So, assume that all fracked gas is exported for a moment - that means vast floods of cash into the Treasury from all those foreigners buying the gas. We will have achieved Monty Python’s tax nirvana, we are taxing foreigners living in foreign countries. As opposed to what happens now, which is that Britain’s use of gas imports enriches the Russian and Norwegian governments.
That is, even if fracking doesn’t change prices it still benefits us here - producing that river of money which can be used to pay for our own government.
There is that possibility that the geology is all wrong. But even then going fracking still does work. Because the universe is contrary and such assertions do in fact need to be tested. Possibly fracked wells will produce gas which we can use or sell to Johnny Foreigner - in which case we are better off. Or, perhaps the naysayers are correct, fracked wells will produce nothing but expensive holes in the ground. In which case we are still better off - now we know. Uncertainty is reduced and we can then stop the political fight and get on with adjusting to reality.
This, of course, being the important part of the “free” in “free market”. Folk get to try out whatever comes into their pretty little heads, free of restrictions by those who either insist it cannot work or would prefer it didn’t and that’s the way we find out what is technologically possible.
There simply is no way at all in which fracking will not work in this wider sense. Even if it never does produce gas we’ve still found that out - and at someone else’s expense to boot. For that’s the capitalism part of the system - Ineos, or Cuadrilla, or some others, carry the expense of drilling those holes. We’re not trying to allocate some limited amount of government or taxpayer resources. We’re simply telling the world’s assembled capitalists “Come on then, if you’re ‘ard enough” and then seeing what happens.
Other than those desperately hoping that it won’t work why wouldn’t we go ahead and do this?