The debate here falls into two categories: a wider category and a narrower category. It is undoubtedly true in terms of the wider category that we will have to leave a lot of the carbon that we otherwise could get out of the ground in the ground over the next few years. Indeed the understanding of the Department of Energy and Climate Change of this process in terms of what will need to be done with regard to gas as a component of wider energy sources in the 1930s reflects that in the way in which gas will need to be used at a much lower level and fairly sparingly in the running of gas-fired power stations. But that is also an issue in terms of what we do with oil, coal and a variety of other mineral sources of energy under our soils.
We are talking specifically about shale gas in the UK, and I want to address the narrow issue of what would be the consequence of us deciding that we really were going to go for a shale gas “bonanza” in this country and try to extract as much shale gas as possible in order to underpin our energy economy. First, there is indeed a large amount of shale gas reserve under the ground in the UK. The question of how much of it is recoverable is another matter. If we recovered what looks to be a possible level of recoverability from the present fairly uncertain estimates of how much shale gas there is under the ground in this country, shale gas could perhaps underpin 10% of our overall necessary gas supplies in this country.
[Mr David Amess in the Chair]
For shale gas to do that, we would have to produce just over 100,000 shale gas wells across this country. There is a popular misconception that drilling for shale gas is like drilling for offshore North sea gas, but that is not the case, as we have already heard. A large number of small wells would be the order of the day; in themselves, they would not produce a large amount of gas but
collectively they would produce quite a large amount of gas. Perhaps there would be about 100,000 to 107,000 wells. Admittedly, they would not be separate wells. Usually, there would be about six or seven wells on one pad, going outwards from the pad, which would create a need for about 18,000 pads in the country. So, if we did a straightforward division between the constituencies of this country, each constituency would have to support 164 wells. Obviously, the wells would not be distributed constituency by constituency, because there would be concentrations in different parts of the country, but I can well understand the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) and my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley).