Draft Onshore Hydraulic Fracturing (Protected Areas) Regulations 2015

Debate between Alan Whitehead and Dennis Skinner

Tuesday 27th October 2015 General Committees

[Dr Whitehead]

The hon. Gentleman may consider that the reason for the 1,200 metre protection; like me, he does not know. It may be that one could consider a process—the Minister may enlighten us in the fullness of time about how that process might work, when she comes up with a list of protected areas, as she has said she might—in which a drilling rig could be set up on the boundary of a national park, then drill diagonally for a number of miles and then go further around to reach whatever it is thought might be reached at 1,200 metres below the national park. I would consider that fairly unlikely, particularly in large protected areas, because the drilling process would have to be extensive even to get there. However, like the hon. Gentleman, I am in the dark about whether that is the reason, because it is not stated in the SI, and indeed was not stated in the main legislation.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

I used to work in very deep pits. My hon. Friend might be coming to the fact that drilling might cause gas to escape. The reason why I say that is that the Government want to be very careful about what they are doing. After Arkwright colliery in the Bolsover constituency closed, it had not been closed very long before there was an escape of gas into about 200 or 300 houses close to the pit. We were lucky that nobody was killed. Had somebody struck a match, the whole village could have gone up in smoke.

That is what can happen, and my hon. Friend has described it almost exactly. The drilling shaft and then, at 90°, the seams of coal and so on—it is almost an exact replica of what it is like in a pit, and I defy anybody to suggest otherwise. We all carried a safety lamp down the pit. Why did we carry them? To find gas. Believe me, when canaries went down the pit, they went for the same reason.