Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate she has made of the concentration of methane in groundwater in mg/l in (a) the UK, (b) Scotland, (c) England, (d) Wales and (e) Northern Ireland.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) is surveying the current distribution of methane concentrations in UK groundwater, focusing on areas where aquifers are underlain by shale units that may be exploited for shale gas. The BGS website provides a summary of the methane baseline results up to April 2014 and links to regional summaries:

www.bgs.ac.uk/research/groundwater/shaleGas/methaneBaseline/results.html

Depending on the geology of a particular site and the pre-existing data available, the environmental regulator (the Environment Agency in England) could also require such monitoring by the operator before a site became operational.