A fossil fuel company, Europa, has plans afoot for a fracking project in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
Despite the 2019 moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, Scarborough’s local authority – or the government – could very well give the project the go-ahead. This is because the ban as it currently stands doesn’t cover it. However, local campaigners already resisting the project have accused the firm of attempting to push “fracking by loophole”.
As a result, the brewing battle has thrown the gaping hole at the heart of the existing fracking moratorium into the spotlight. What’s more, it has inadvertently underscored the current gaps in the new Labour government’s pledge to ban fracking.
Fracking plans afoot in Scarborough, North Yorkshire
UK-based fossil fuel firm Europa Oil & Gas is gearing up to frack for gas near Scarborough, at a cliffside site within the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Heritage Coast.
It will involve a form of fracking known as a ‘proppant squeeze’. Essentially, it’s a process that injects a proppant – a solid material, usually sand – and water slurry into the wellbore. Technically, this isn’t the same procedure that Cuadrilla used at notorious fracking site Preston New Road. This is because it uses less water, and due to the proppant, less pressure to carry out the operation. Ultimately though, the end goal is no different – that is, to fracture the gas-bearing rock.
Operator Europa holds a 40% stake in this onshore oil and gas licence at Burniston. The remainder is owned by Egdon Resources parent company Heyco Energy Group (40%), and Petrichor Energy UK (20%).
In July, Egdon, on behalf of Europa, put its feelers out with North Yorkshire Council over its proposals. It submitted a screening request from the local authority. Essentially, this asked it to set out whether its full application would require an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).
Already, Europa has indicated that it will submit a full application for gas exploration at the Scarborough site by the end of the year. Notably however, this wouldn’t be to extract gas for commercial sale. Instead, it would be to test the rates of gas it could bring into commercial production, which would require a further licence.
At this point then, across 37 weeks, it is proposing to prepare the site, drill a borehole, frack for gas, and finally decommission and restore the site. Ultimately though, if it finds gas that it can frack – and it certainly expects to – a production application will invariably follow.
In other words, Europa is sizing up the lucrative prospects of this so-called “low volume hydraulic fracturing” at Burniston. Yet, this industry ascribed framing is misleading – and for multiple reasons. Crucially, it’s not quite the small affair the company is making it out to be.
Soon to be the UK’s largest onshore gas producer?
In fact, if the project at Burniston goes ahead, it could very well be the biggest onshore gas field operating in the UK.
As it stands, Angus Energy’s Saltfleetby conventional gas field in Lincolnshire is the UK’s largest producing field. It has made up nearly three-quarters of the onshore gas production in the UK for the first half of 2024. Similarly in 2023, it made up over 70% for the whole year.
So far, the gas field has averaged at producing just shy of seven million standard cubic feet of gas per day(mmscf/d). By comparison, the second largest onshore producer has averaged less than 1mmscf/d in the first six months of 2024. Europa’s modelling has indicated the site could produce approximately 6mmscf/d. Obviously, this means that Burniston could be hot on Saltfleetby’s heels.
In fact, in an investor presentation, Europa CEO Will Holland suggested that it’s possible it could far exceed this, reaching as high as 20mmscf/d. Largely though, the company expects it to be closer to the lower 6mmscf/d.
Despite this, by offshore standards, it’ll make up a tiny proportion of the UK’s domestic gas production. In 2023, 34 offshore fields produced over 6mmscf/d on average. The largest producing gas field was majority owned Spirit Energy’s Cygnus in the southern North Sea. British gas owner Centrica holds the largest stake in the fossil fuel company. This produced 210mmscf/d on average in 2023 – 35 times more than Europa’s modelled estimates for Burniston.
Fossil fuel company’s biggest cash cow
Nonetheless, Burniston would still place within the top 50% of gas fields currently producing in the UK. And certainly, it would sit among the highest onshore gas producers, if not the top.
Holland also told Burniston residents in an information meeting that the company thinks it could recover around 50 billion cubic feet (bcf) from the gas reservoir. This is over double the remaining recoverable reserves of gas in the UK’s current largest onshore site at Saltfleetby.
Most significantly however, Europa has been curiously quiet about one key detail. That is, how the project at Burniston could prove to be among its biggest cash cows.
As it stands, the company makes most of its profits from its stake at Wressle oil and gas field in Lincolnshire. Of its total £6.7m revenue in 2023, £5.3m of this was from the site alone.
Yet, Angus Energy’s operations at Saltfleetby has netted it £12.1m in just the first six months of 2024. Even with just a 40% stake at Burniston, Europa – and its partners – could turn a tidy multi-million profit on it. Therefore, there’s a decent possibility it could become the company’s main money-spinner.
Slipping past the fracking moratorium
Of course, there’s currently a moratorium on fracking in the UK. With the exception of a brief period under Liz Truss’s short-lived stint as prime minister, this has been in place since 2019.
Given this, the fracking project at Burniston surely shouldn’t be on the table? However, Europa and co wouldn’t be submitting an application for it if that were the case. For one, the fact is, the moratorium isn’t an outright and permanent ban anyway.
Aside from that, there’s also another gaping hole in it too. Crucially, it’s this lapse in regulation within the moratorium that the fossil fuel companies are targeting in particular at Burniston.
So, local climate campaigners have called it “fracking by loophole” and for good reason – because that’s exactly what it is.
Unsurprisingly, Europa has fervently refuted that it constitutes this. It has laboured over this point in its public-facing literature for the project. In particular, it states that:
low volume hydraulic fracturing operations, which have been used for many decades in the UK, were not included in the 2019 moratorium. They were deliberately excluded because these operations are well established and proven to be safe, both from a health and safety and an environmental perspective. As such the legal basis under which the ban on high volume hydraulic fracturing was prosecuted does not apply. This is therefore not a “loophole” in the law relating to the 2019 moratorium.
Despite its protestations however, it’s definitively a form of fracking. For one, the clue is in the name: hydraulic fracturing – which is quite literally, fracking. In other words, the process the fossil fuel companies plan to use at Burniston involves fracturing rock to obtain gas.
UK’s legal definition of fracking open to abuse
However, what Europa has said about the moratorium is correct – at least insofar as the fact it doesn’t apply to this specific form of fracking. Largely, the reason for this is the UK’s legal definition for fracking. Crucially, the Infrastructure Act 2015 only includes projects that involve the injection:
(i)more than 1,000 cubic metres of fluid at each stage, or expected stage, of the hydraulic fracturing, or
(ii)more than 10,000 cubic metres of fluid in total.
When the then Tory government implemented this, leading geologist professor Stuart Hazeldine at the University of Edinburgh lambasted it for only defining fracking by the amount of high pressure fluid injected. Tellingly, at the time he used the same word to describe this that anti-fracking campaigners have levied against the Burniston project. Then too, he branded it a word evidently instilling dread in the minds of Europa’s top brass: a “very large loophole”.
In fact, Hazeldine showed exactly why the definition was hugely controversial. In an analysis of more than 17,000 gas wells fracked in the US, he identified that 43% of these would elude the UK’s definition. For 4,500 fracked oil wells, 89% would not qualify as fracking under UK rules.
In short then, it is fracking by any other name. It’s just that the former government’s legal definition of fracking, and ergo its moratorium, doesn’t cover it.
Deliberately leaving the door open
The Canary talked to a spokeperson for Frack Free Scarborough, who have been fighting the project since Europa announced it. They told us that this had been a deliberate “sleight of hand”, emphasising that:
When we were campaigning, and Horse Hill were campaigning, and Preston New Road were campaigning, and everybody nationally was campaigning to get a fracking ban, people were campaigning for an end to all forms of fracking. That was the fight — to say, ‘We don’t want any of this. We don’t want acidification near Scunthorpe. We don’t want proppant squeeze in Wressle. We certainly don’t want high volume, high pressure fracking at Preston New Road or at KM8.’
But when you wake up on the morning of the renewed moratorium and the ink has dried, you realise they’ve just appeased people by saying fracking is not allowed, and all of this other stuff we’ve been campaigning about is still perfectly OK. It’s not.
Needless to say, this has certainly benefited fossil fuel companies like Egdon and Europa. Now, Burniston will be another case and point.
In fact, it actually isn’t the first time a fracking project like this has slipped through the moratorium’s widely-holed net. Another site part-owned by Europa, and operated by Egdon conducted the same process in 2021. Union Jack Oil also holds a stake in this licence.
At Wressle oil and gas field in North Lincolnshire, Egdon carried out a proppant squeeze operation for oil. The site the second largest producing onshore oilfield in the UK after Wytch Farm, in Dorset.
What’s more, only this September, North Lincolnshire Council greenlit Egdon to conduct two other smaller scale fracks at Wressle for oil.
Labour to ‘ban fracking for good’?
Frack Free Scarborough’s spokesperson also raised with the Canary that obviously, the “political context has changed” with Labour now in government. And notably, in its manifesto, it promised to “ban fracking for good.”
Of course, this follows its opposition motion in 2022 to do just that as well. Vitally however, this was essentially to shift the moratorium into a permanent ban.
Ostensibly then, it referred to fracking as set out by the active legal definition in the Infrastructure Act. Obviously, it’s this which currently allows projects like Burniston to bypass the moratorium. In all likelihood then, the manifesto’s commitment will seek to do the same. And if this is the case, all fracking won’t be banned “for good” after all.
Despite this, Scarborough and Whitby MP Alison Hume has already come out against the project, so the Frack Free Scarborough spokesperson explained that:
As a campaign, one of the things that we will do is encourage Alison Hume and others in the Labour Party to put pressure on Keir Starmer to listen more strongly to us than he might be tempted to listen to the fossil fuel companies.
Already though, Starmer and his government are a little too close for comfort with the fossil fuel industry. The party cosied up to corporate lobbyists shilling for the oil and gas sector at its recent 2024 conference. In fact, Global Witness identified that oil and gas linked companies and organisations sponsored a fifth of its climate events.
What happens at Burniston will ultimately be a litmus test for the new government’s commitment to ending this environmentally destructive, and climate-wrecking fossil fuel practice. It could do so “for good” and for the good of all communities these companies are planning to impose themselves on. At this rate however, the new Labour government just might listen to those that shout the loudest with their wallet – and the lobbyists representing them that have had its ear all along.
Featured image via the Canary
