The extraction of shale gas is a hugely controversial issue.
Green lobbyists such as Friends of the Earth (FoE) have long campaigned against hydraulic fracturing more commonly known as fracking claiming it poses a huge risk to the environment and the people living in the shadow of shale gas sites.
They claim “highly toxic” chemicals pumped into wells to open up shale gas seams have the potential to contaminate groundwater and soil and pose a risk to public health.
FoE insist those risks are not just pie-in-the-sky scaremongering.
They claim communities in Australia are already suffering from symptoms associated with exposure to chemicals used in the fracking process, with a “growing body of research” associating birth defects and cancer clusters in those regions to the fracking operations.
So, why would anyone want to risk fracking here?
There are two answers to that question, in my opinion.
The first is that there are as many people willing to swear blind that fracking is safe as those who say it isn’t.
In my experience of situations where there are such diametrically opposed viewpoints, the truth is most likely to lie somewhere in the middle ground between the guarantees and the scare stories.
The second answer to the question is more clear-cut. It is about money.
A quick look westwards across the pond shows just how economically powerful a mature shale industry producing both oil and gas can be.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported the US had overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s single largest oil producer, with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels.
The US has reached the top of that hugely lucrative pile on the back of soaring oil recovery from shale plays in Texas and North Dakota, where fracking has proven the key to unlocking reserves that had previously been too tricky to tap.
Although I personally do not have experience of the sector Stateside, the literature available on the US shale gas boom is clear. It has been the economic crutch on which the US has built its recovery.
Governments around the world and, for avoidance of doubt, Westminster and Holyrood are included in that group have seen the transformatory power of a shale-led revolution. They want a piece of the action, and the energy supply security it could bring.
They know fracking stirs the emotions it was once even blamed for stirring the people of Blackpool after a shale well triggered earth tremors so they have played a relatively low-key game thus far.
But things have now changed radically.
On Monday, the UK Government opened an onshore licensing round for companies wishing to extract gas from the thousands of potential drill sites across the UK.
The sop to detractors was a pledge by Ministers that national parks would be exempt from licence applications other than in exceptional circumstances.
Within hours of the licensing round going live, a Scottish Government expert scientific panel published their report into the prospects for “unconventional” oil and gas in Scotland, including a major potential play stretching across much of the Central Belt.
The document’s authors immediately referenced the situation in the US but, while cautioning that Scotland was unlikely to benefit to a similar degree, concluded there “could be a number of positive economic impacts from the development of unconventional hydrocarbons” north of the border.
Panel chairman Dr Chris Masters also said the technology currently existed to extract unconventionals safely.
So from this week’s evidence I think it is clear that not only is Britain heading down the unconventionals route, we are now accelerating along the shale superhighway.
If you accept as I now do that the direction of travel on unconventionals is already determined, the real issue is not if we should frack, but how we should frack.
With shale, the UK energy sector needs to move forward with caution and earn public trust.
A robust and transparent regulatory framework, which provides for sustained public engagement and is designed to manage down risk wherever it occurs, is a vital first step in the development of shale in the UK and is the very least that should be expected.