Write to your Councillor about Fracking

This brilliant resource was shared with us by NO Fracking in Sussex. Please see here and here to find out more about them.

If you can send it on paper too - all the better!

You can find contact details for District and County Councilors here:

http://www.writetothem.com/

Your Parish Council should have a website with contact details for all Parish Councillors. 

Dear [Insert Councillor]

This is a time of unprecedented challenge for all Councilors charged with the responsibility of evaluating planning applications for fossil fuel exploration and extraction.

I am sending you this letter in order that Councils may avoid recrimination / litigation further down the line, and to raise greater Local Government awareness of a potentially very dangerous practice for which planning permission has repeatedly been acquired through subterfuge and through lack of awareness on the part of British citizens and their representatives.

As you may by now be aware, hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is a highly controversial method of hydrocarbon extraction.  If they haven't already, industry applications for its deployment are likely to be landing on your desk very soon.

Fracking for shale gas/oil and coal bed methane threatens to contaminate our air, our aquifers and our soil and to put at risk our seismic security. 

Fracking is an unpredictable and thus far a largely unregulated energy procurement practice.  It has been demonstrated both to trigger earth tremors and to contaminate groundwater irreversibly, while releasing radioactive toxins previously locked safely into subterranean geology.  The fracking process also uses vast quantities of water, potentially in areas already experiencing critical reservoir drought levels.

Hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas is neither a sustainable nor effective way to meet our energy needs.  It's a short-term, finite energy procurement technology, the methane emissions of which, give it a worse carbon profile than coal.

I have highlighted below some of the issues you may encounter, of which you may not yet be aware:

• In Balcombe, West Sussex, both Parish and County Councils have conceded that drilling and test-fracking permission applications from Cuadrilla got through “under the radar” last year and that far greater vigilance is now needed, both at Council and Government level if we are collectively to make informed and responsible decisions that safeguard our future.

• Industry applications for planning permission may use the word “stimulation” as a euphemism for fracking.

For example:-

“There may be a need to stimulate … by pumping water under pressure into the natural fractures in the shale formations to open them up to allow the gas to flow more freely.”

That is hydraulic fracturing.

• The Deputy Chairman of Balcombe Parish Council has stated as follows:

"Certainly the Parish Council can be criticised for not having given this application the attention that, with the wisdom of hindsight, it clearly deserved, but I wonder how many of the critics, had they been members of the Parish Council at the time, would have had the knowledge or inclination to have investigated the technical aspects of the application."