Protests and court cases have failed but the government’s rules on tremors could wreck shale gas economics

Protests, legal challenges and planning rejections have failed to stop the return of Fracking in Britain, but the government’s regulations on earthquakes are fast emerging as the biggest threat to the nascent shale gas industry.

The energy company Cuadrilla has been forced to stop work at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire twice in four days – on Friday last week and on Monday – due to Minor Earthquakes occurring while it was fracking. The tremors breached a seismic threshold imposed after fracking caused minor earthquakes at a nearby Cuadrilla site in 2011.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a way of extracting natural gas from shale rock formations that are often deep underground. It involves pumping water, chemicals and usually sand underground at high pressure to fracture shale – hence the name – and release the gas trapped within to be collected back at the surface.

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