The environmental campaign group Greenpeace has launched legal action in Britain against the process of hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ for shale gas.
Greenpeace’s landmark legal challenge to halt fracking in England claims that drilling under people’s homes without permission is unlawful and constitutes trespass.
The campaign group made the announcement at a press conference in Lancashire, which has been the front line of the UK’s nascent shale gas industry.
Greenpeace now hopes thousands of people will join the legal challenge, creating a patchwork of “no go” areas for shale oil and gas developers across the country.
“Under English law, if you own land, your rights extend to all the ground beneath it, and that means if someone drills under your home without permission it is trespass,” said Greenpeace senior campaigner Anna Jones.
“To avoid being liable for trespass, drillers would need landowners’ permission, and this case is about people explicitly declaring they do not give that permission.
“This will make it extremely difficult for companies to move ahead with any horizontal drilling plans.”
British environmental news website BusinessGreen reports the action is based on a test case from three years ago when former Harrods prestige department store owner Mohammed Al Fayed successfully argued at the High Court that a company drilling for oil under his Surrey estate had trespassed.
However, the government last month released a consultation proposing to amend the law to allow drilling under homes even when companies do not have residents’ permission.
Under current proposals, communities will be offered payments of $168,000 per drill site and one per cent of revenues from production, which could amount to between $8.4 million and $17m per well over 25 years.
The move is the latest effort by campaigners to curtail the development of the UK’s nascent ‘fracking’ industry, which critics argue uses huge amounts of energy and water, causes earth tremors, and can pollute local water sources with chemicals.
Those claims are rejected by the industry, which argues the technique has been used safely in the UK for 25 years.
Green groups are also concerned that a boom in shale gas development will lock the UK into fossil fuel infrastructure and undermine investment in renewable energy.
However, the government and developers maintain that UK shale gas can be extracted safely and can serve to support the transition to a lower carbon energy mix by replacing coal power.
Responding the legal challenge, Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker wrote on Twitter: “A global shift from coal to responsible gas is vital to avert dangerous #ClimateChange stoking up NIMBY-ism is deeply myopic!”
