Green Madness: UK to Fill Last Natural Gas Fracking Wells With Cement

In stark contrast to Donald Trump’s agenda in the United States of exploiting cheap domestic natural gas to bolster the economy, Britain is preparing to literally pour concrete into its only remaining open fracking wells.

The North Sea Transition Authority regulator has ordered the permanent closure of two natural gas wells at Preston New Road in Lancashire, some eight years after shale gas was extracted from the site. The owner of the wells, Cuadrilla, said that it will start covering them in concrete starting next month, The Telegraph reports.

The closure of Britain’s final two open wells comes despite the country expanding imports of natural gas from the United States and elsewhere to meet its energy demands, with so-called green alternatives still lacking in their ability to power the country on their own.

Cuadrilla condemned the decision, noting that domestic shale gas could help Britain become more energy-independent and claimed that Britain’s gas stockpiles are down by over a third compared to last year.

Caudrilla chief executive Francis Egan said: “The UK is heavily reliant on natural gas to keep the lights on, to heat our homes and to provide cost-effective energy to British industry.”

“Keeping these wells open doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny, but once they are concreted over then we lose easy access to supplies of shale gas that could be used for decades to come.”

Fracking was initially banned in England in 2019 by supposedly Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May after mild earthquakes were recorded at a test site in Lancashire. The connection between fracking and earthquakes has been disputed in Britain.

While former Prime Minister Liz Truss briefly attempted to lift the ban, her decision was quickly reversed by her successor, Rishi Sunak, after she was booted out of office in what she alleged was a deep state coup against her short-lived administration.

The decision by successive governments to refuse to exploit Britain’s natural resources, while importing those exact same resources from abroad and investing heavily in so-called green energy sources, have left the country vulnerable to international price shocks, such as the war in Ukraine.

According to data from the International Energy Agency, Britain’s prices were the highest among all 31 member states in 2023 at 25.85 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to 17.84p in France, 17.71p in Germany, and 6.48p in the United States. It was also significantly higher than in previous years in Britain, with prices being just 8.89p a decade prior.

Despite this, the left-wing Labour government has decided to double down on the green agenda, vowing to transform the country into a “zero carbon electricity system by 2030”.

Reform UK depuy leader Richard Tice, a longtime advocate for fracking in Britain, said that the decision to permanently close the Preston New Road represented “gross negligence, both financial and for energy security”.

“We have hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayer-owned shale gas we should be using,” he said. “We should adopt Trump’s slogan: ‘drill baby drill’.”