THERE could be up to 100 billion barrels of oil onshore beneath southern England, the chief executive of a small exploration firm told the BBC yesterday in an interview. To which the correct response was “yes, but”.
Based on an analysis of samples from a single well drilled near London’s Gatwick airport, UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG) estimates there could be 158 million barrels per square mile (2.5 square kilometres) in the local area.
The company described the Weald Basin discovery as “a potentially strategic asset for the UK”, and went on to say “the key thing about this discovery is about what Britain and the British government want to do about this strategic asset”.
Onshore oil and gas production touches a raw nerve in Britain, where it pits exploration firms against environmental groups worried about climate change and the industrialisation of the landscape. It also plays into the country’s north/south political divisions, and even exposes internal tensions between the Conservative Party’s pro-business wing and its supporters in rural southern England.
The idea that an exploration company had “found” up to 100 billion barrels below the rolling chalk landscape of southern England has propelled the story to the top of the daily news agenda.
It immediately raises the prospect of thousands of wells being drilled across the landscape of some of the wealthiest parts of the country.
“England’s green and pleasant land” was immortalised by William Blake in his poem Jerusalem, which is an unofficial anthem for England.
“It’s one thing to have fracking in the vast plains of America,” one Conservative member of parliament complained to the Financial Times in 2013.
“It’s a whole different matter when people will see gas production in the rolling hills of Surrey.”
But the problems with the Gatwick oil well story should be obvious and they offer a cautionary tale about the difficulty of estimating oil resources and writing about them.
Substantial
There is nothing new in the idea that substantial amounts of oil and gas are buried across Britain. There are three large oil-and gas-rich sedimentary basins across southern England, north-eastern England, and the central belt of Scotland.
Substantial volumes of oil and gas have been produced in all three areas for well over a century.
In Victorian times, shales on England’s south coast were mined as one of the country’s first sources of oil.
In Scotland and northern England, oil-bearing shales were used to produce manufactured town gas for early street lighting.
More than 2 000 wells have been drilled onshore since 1902, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Britain’s onshore fields have collectively produced more than 500 million barrels of oil, though that compares with more than 45 billion barrels recovered from the North Sea.
During World War II, a specially recruited team of Oklahoma roughnecks drilled more than 100 oil wells in Sherwood Forest, which is famous as the setting for Robin Hood.
Billeted at Kelham monastery near Newark in Nottinghamshire, the drillers developed an oilfield that eventually produced 3 000 barrels per day.
By the end of the war, the field has produced 3.5 million barrels of oil ( The Secret of Sherwood Forest: Oil Production in England during World War II, 1973).
The biggest onshore field, at Wytch Farm in the Weald Basin, is also the largest in western Europe. Discovered in 1979, it had estimated recoverable reserves of almost half a billion barrels and production peaked at around 100 000 barrels per day in 1996.
Meanwhile, a string of other small fields, containing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil between them, stretch across the Weald Basin and have been discreetly producing for the last 30 years ( Fracking beneath southern England’s rolling hills, June 2013).
There is no question that there are billions of barrels of oil beneath southern England, but how much could be technically or profitably produced remains extremely uncertain. – Reuters