 green blitz, the US Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act combined. It is such a shock to the global energy order that Brussels deems it a direct threat to Europe's industrial base. The US aims to halve CO2 emissions in the power sector and lift sales of electric vehicles ninefold to 4.5m a year by 2030. The post-fossil arms race is moving into high gear. The EU is launching its own bid for economic survival with its Fit for 55 package, and its Hydrogen Strategy. So is Japan with its Green Transformation (GX) scheme. 'The energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes,' said Mr Birol. China aims to eat everybody's lunch. It is angling to conquer global market share across all zero-carbon technologies, much as it has already done to solar rivals, arguably by means of IP theft and predatory dumping. 'They are going to meet their 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewables by 2025,' said Kingsmill Bond from analysts RMI. If anything, the IEA's forecast is too cautious. It assumes that the cost gains in wind, solar, storage, and electrolysis, stall at the end of this decade, unlike the findings by Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking. The latter expects them to keep dropping under the time-honoured principles of Moore's law and Wrights law, which posit that the costs of disruptive new technologies drop exponentially with time and by cumulative production. Britain's frackers have been treated dishonourably, the victims of caricature. Their technology has been used for over half a century and is not inherently more wicked than other forms of gas drilling. Cuadrilla was harassed to death with earthquake limits set at 0.5 on the){kind=link}
The industry will be rendered uncompetitive before it ever produces gas at scale
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has demolished the commercial case for fracking in the UK with unanswerable finality. Rishi Sunak is right to put an end to that romantic legacy of the culture wars, even if his stated motive is to cleave to the Tory manifesto.
One can only admire the wildcat shale frackers of the Marcellus and Permian Basin in the US. They have slashed CO2 emissions by displacing coal.
They have turned the US from struggling energy importer into the world’s oil and gas hegemon in just 15 years, transforming the geopolitical balance of power in favour of the liberal democracies. They have rescued Europe from its existential dependency on Russian gas. It is only because of them that Ukraine can be saved, and therefore that the EU can itself be saved as a viable project. Some gratitude might be in order.
But Lancashire is not West Texas. The rule of thumb for fracking in the UK is that extraction costs are twice as high. Breakneck advances in green technology are in any case changing the energy price hierarchy beyond recognition. The time for fracking in Britain’s Bowland shale field has come and gone.