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The richest person in the UK has launched an attack on the government's fracking rules, accusing ministers of policies that would provoke an "energy crisis" and "irreparable damage" to the economy.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, president of the petrochemical company Ineos, committed four years ago to launch a fracking revolution in the United Kingdom, but the company got bogged down in the planning of battles and has not yet drilled or broken a single well.
The businessman, worth £ 21 billion, accused the government of taking an impractical and unnecessary stance on seismicity and planning rules.
"They make politics with the country's future. We have a non-existent energy strategy and we are heading towards an energy crisis that will cause irreparable long-term damage to the economy and the government must decide if it will finally give priority to the country and develop an industry of viable British land gas. ," he said.
Ineos, which holds significant exploration rights in the United Kingdom, has stated that it wants the seismicity limit at which hydraulic fracturing operations are to be suspended be raised, compared to its current level of 0.5 magnitude. He said the cap should be a "reasonable" level but did not say what it would be.
Cuadrilla, the only shale gas company to have fractures in the UK, had to repeatedly stop fracking at its site near Blackpool as its operations caused small earthquakes exceeding the regulatory threshold.
Geologists have said that the limit could be increased without difficulty to a magnitude of 1.5, above most light quakes caused by Cuadrilla.
But Energy Minister Claire Perry told the Guardian last month that she did not intend to review the rules.
In a statement issued on Monday, Ineos attacked the government for setting the limit at 0.5, calling it "a baseless level of science revealing a complete lack of understanding of the shale extraction process".
The company pointed to other countries that have much more relaxed rules on seismicity and fracturing. But the British government has repeatedly said that one of the virtues of the British shale gas industry is that it would be strictly and rigorously regulated.
Ineos claimed that the government "blocked the shale by the back door" and described the planning regime as "archaic, sluggish, excessively expensive and practically unachievable".
Ministers have already rewritten the planning rules to accelerate shale gas applications and have proposed a second round of reforms to facilitate the drilling of exploration wells by shale companies.
However, local authorities rejected the three shale gas sites in Ineos. Two of them, one in South Yorkshire and the other in Derbyshire, have since been approved after the company's appeal. The company is calling for a third, in Woodsetts, South Yorkshire.
Ineos claimed that the UK chose to bet "the future of our manufacturing industry on wind turbines and gas imported from potentially unstable countries".
A risk badessment carried out by the government last week concluded that UK gas supplies were "resilient to the most unlikely combination of strong demand and disruption in the United States. ;offer".
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