Aylesbury Town Councillor for Oakfield Learn more
by Mark Willis on 13 January, 2013
So the Tories are allowing Gas/Oil Fracking to resume, the brilliant new idea from the Cons is to allow a debatable way of extracting gas and oil to power our homes for the next 30 years.
This decision is at best questionable, Fracking has brought headlines of doom and disaster, or as a saint and saviour wherever it has been tried, the most notable being the USA where apparently this extraction will power their economy for 30 years, that is the Tory vision for us, so what’s the problem?
Well the process uses massive amounts of water, the polluted water then has to be stored before it can eventually be treated, the water is polluted with ground contaminants and the chemicals injected into the earth to open up the fractures and recover the gas/oil, this makes the process of fracking more expensive than traditional oil and gas, but according to the supporters of the process it can power our lives for 30 years, or will it?
I attended a SAVE (Support Aylesbury Vale Environment) meeting at the Oculus with a gentleman called Paul Mobbs,(http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/index.shtml) his talk raised many issues about the rational of Fracking, in a global energy market with consumption of fossil fuels rising and the supply decreasing will fracking achieve anything other than make the companies extracting the fuel, and the government through the taxes on that extraction a lot of money, anyone who thinks that Fracked Gas and oil will reduce household bills is I suspect being at best led up the garden path, and at worst deliberately mislead.
Fracking was stopped a few years ago because of the link to earthquakes in the Blackpool area, now I’m less worried about that then the prospect of millions of gallons of highly polluted water being accidentally released into the environment, and if you think that it won’t possibly come to leafy Buckinghamshire think again, we are in a area that could well be exploited.
I equate Fracking with an addict who has got to get their fix, I would rather see our country get off of our addiction to fossil fuels and be more creative in our use and production of energy, rather than carrying on our present path of environmental destruction, in short Wind and Solar over the potential environmental damage that Fracking may bring.
Leave a comment
Leave a Reply