Reporting of Lord Smith's views on shale gas misses the important caveats
- 09 May 2012, 12:00
- Robin Webster
Reading
yesterday's
headlines announcing the head of the Environment Agency's
support for shale gas fracking, you could be forgiven for
concluding that Lord Smith has joined the ranks of
shale gas enthusiasts who have been so enthusiastically
promoting the technology in the UK media over the last few
months.
Smith's speech at
Royal Society of Arts yesterday evening, however, gave a
different - and more interesting - picture.
The new kid on the block
In his speech, Lord Smith echoed other analysts - including the
head of Ofgem, as we
covered last week - in suggesting that whatever the merits or
otherwise of burning gas, the development of more gas capacity
looks increasingly likely as renewables take time to come onstream
at capacity, and nuclear power struggles to attract investment.
Whilst gas is a lower-carbon fuel than coal, Smith expressed the
fear that a drift into gas would "land us" with an array of
gas-fired power stations which are likely to be around for some
time.
Were significant shale gas resources available, this would of
course become more likely. Recent estimates of the amount of shale
gas available to in the UK aren't
exactly definitive, but Lord Smith stated that the amount of
gas is "likely to be significant, even if it isn't huge." (Given
Smith's job, this might offer an insight into likely conclusions
from the British
Geographical Society's forthcoming assessment of the onshore
potential for shale gas in the UK).
In this context, Smith argued, it is essential that gas should
only be developed if gas plant can be fitted with carbon capture
and storage technology:
"This is why it is essential that we
look to develop carbon capture and storage for gas and not just for
coal. CCS is quite simply a sine qua none. If we are to have a
chance of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions around the world,
CCS has to be brought into play for both coal and gas"
As we discussed yesterday, government policy is somewhat behind
the curve on this one. DECC announced in
March that power plants constructed now will be subject to an
emissions performance standard - which regulates the amount of
pollution a plant can emit as it produces electricity - to 450g of
carbon per kilowatt-hour. Because of the carbon intensity of
different fuels, this means that new coal plants would need to fit
CCS, but gas power plants would not.
It also presents something of a problem because commercial scale
CCS doesn't really exist yet. Lord Smith, rather understandably,
said that we need to "get a move on" in developing and
commercialising carbon capture and storage technology - which, as
he noted, is expected by the International Energy Agency to provide one
fifth of the world's emissions reductions by 2050.
Support for renewables
A significant chunk of Smith's speech was devoted to bigging-up
renewable power and the efforts of business to take the lead in the
green economy. He argued that the UK could "lead the world" on wave
and tidal energy generation, and that we should not "lose out" over
these newer renewable technologies, as we did on wind power twenty
years ago.
Smith also suggested that the public and media debate on these
issues is backsliding - arguing that three years ago "the
environment, the values of natural resources and the realities of
climate change were all generally acknowledged, accepted and
endorsed as political imperatives across the spectrum of public
discourse" but that now
"I fear their political salience has
waned, and part of my purpose in being here tonight is to shout out
as loudly as I can that the environment still matters, that green
is as important as growth, and that the two do absolutely walk hand
in hand".
In a way, though, Smith's speech offered an interesting insight
into the degree of unanimity that remains across the political and
policy spectrum about the importance of sorting out the UK's energy
sector. Smith praised the continuing cross-party commitment to
tackling climate change and its consequences in the UK, and in
bemoaning the use of green polices as a 'political football' he was
in agreement with a speaker from the Confederation of British
Industry, who emphasised that constantly changing policies make
businesses "nervous" and that there is a need for clarity of
direction across the political spectrum.
In the questions, Lord Smith's final point was that "one of the
besetting problems of democracy" that it works on electoral
timescales, which inevitably builds in short-term thinking -
whereas business, particularly the energy sector, needs to think on
long-term horizons.
The chair concluded that in order to achieve that long-term
thinking, it may be that politicians need to catch up with where
businesses and the public already are, rather than the other way
around.