Britain’s largest storage site for natural gas will remain closed to new supplies for at least another year, the FT reports. Centrica, the owner of British Gas, says that its Rough storage facility off the Yorkshire coast would not be able to receive new gas injections until May 2018 at the earliest because of concerns about the integrity of its ageing wells. Rough can supply up to 10% of the UK’s daily gas needs and accounts for 70% of domestic storage capacity. Gas prices for next winter rose more than 1% yesterday, says the Times, while a gas analyst at Thomson Reuters told the Telegraph that “although we do not foresee any problems in gas supply [for next winter], the price at which this gas is supplied is likely to be more expensive and exposed to volatility.” Centrica initially shut the facility for injections and withdrawals of gas in June last year, says Reuters. Withdrawals resumed in December but injections were put hold until at least July 1, which has now been extended. In a Bloomberg Markets piece about meeting the UK’s energy needs after Brexit, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the Rough storage facility won’t ever return to service.

Residents and anti-fracking campaigners in Lancashire have lost a high court challenge to prevent fracking for shale gas in Fylde. The Preston New Road Action Group applied for a judicial review of the government’s decision to approve Cuadrilla’s plans to frack at a site at Little Plumpton near Blackpool, but Mr Justice Dove dismissed the case. It is the final stage in a planning battle that began in June 2015 when Lancashire County Council refused permission for the site because of its impact on noise and visual amenity, reports DeSmog. This decision was subsequently overturned by Communities Secretary Sajid Javid. Now the high court has ruled in favour of the Communities Secretary, Cuadrilla is expected to begin drilling within weeks. This will be the first time that shale rock will be fracked horizontally, says the BBC. The Telegraph and Energy Live News also have the story.

President Donald Trump is lining up a vocal critic of climate change science to serve as the highest-ranking environmental official in the White House. Kathleen Hartnett White, who says carbon emissions are harmless and should not be regulated, is a top contender to run the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the White House’s in-house environmental policy shop, sources told Politico. White House officials brought White in for an interview late last month, and she met Trump at Trump Tower in November when she was under consideration to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. White is a former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who now works for a conservative think tank. A final decision on the CEQ job hasn’t yet been made and other candidates are still in the frame. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment, saying, “We will let you know when we have an announcement.” Meanwhile, The Hill reports that Trump administration officials met with tribal leaders yesterday to discuss keeping open a major coal plant on the Navajo reservation in southwestern US.

Scott Pruitt, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, is facing criticism from the right wing of the political spectrum for refusing to challenge the endangerment finding, which underpins the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. The ruling categorises greenhouse gases as dangerous to human health and welfare and led to the legal requirement for the EPA to regulate them. Pruitt has told the White House and Congress that he will not try to reverse the finding, saying that such a move would almost certainly be overturned by the courts. But Pruitt is “now being pilloried by conservative allies of the White House,” say the New York Times. Meanwhile, The Hill reports that the EPA’s regulatory reform task force, established by President Trump in an executive order in February, is seeking public input on which Obama-era rules to roll back. “We are supporting the restoration of America’s economy through extensive reviews of the misaligned regulatory actions from the past administration,” Pruitt said in a statement. And finally, Pruitt is to get a “24/7 security detail” under the latest budget proposal, says the Washington Post. This is a higher level of protection than his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, received, says the Post. The EPA did not immediately offer comment about the reasoning behind the request.

The price of solar power in India fell to a record low in a competitive tender won by Solairedirect, the local arm of French firm Engie. The record low price of 3.15 rupees (four British pence) per kilowatt-hour was the winning bid in an auction in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The bid to develop 250 megawatts of solar power is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambition to install 175 gigawatts of renewables by 2022. Indian power minister Piyush Goyal, greeted the news through Twitter: “Clean affordable power for all,” he said. At the same time, the government remains committed to coal, says Climate Home. Goyal told parliament on Monday that coal “will remain and continue to remain our mainstay and there was no such agreement in Paris that will stop us from continuing to encourage coal-based generation of power.”

The national magazine of the Sierra Club carries an interview with Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Environment and Energy Analyst, on whether the US will back out of the Paris Agreement. Trump is faced with a dilemma, says Harrabin: “If he stays in, he may get severe pushback from other countries for scrapping Obama’s policies. If he pulls out, he’ll get diplomatic flack and will have absolutely no say in how global matters unfold. His hand is trickier than most people are suggesting.” Harrabin says he would put a “small bet” on Trump staying in the Paris Agreement: “Just because tactically, if I were in the US administration, that’s where I’d like to be.”

Although the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching for a second year in a row, it can be saved if action is taken immediately, says zoologist and author, Jules Howard in the Guardian. “Only one third of the entire Great Barrier Reef remains unbleached,” he writes. “The bell, it seems, is tolling for one of the most biologically active parts of planet Earth.” But, he says, “is the Great Barrier Reef really in terminal decline? Is it really done and dusted? I don’t think so.” Coral bleaching, while incredibly serious and concerning, is not death, Howard says. “Coral reefs can recover. There is reason for hope, therefore. Hope, but not complacency.”

Both the current and historical climate of a region are needed to explain the varying carbon reserves found in modern soils, a new study says. Researchers used data from more than 5000 sites around the world to identify the relative importance of current and past (Last Glacial Maximum and mid-Holocene) climatic conditions in regulating soil carbon in natural and agricultural areas. The findings support the theory that soil carbon stocks take millennia to build but only decades to be lost, the researchers say.