Fracking Fails in Scotland

England may be tentatively embracing shale drilling once again, but Scotland is taking a more wary approach. Earlier this summer Britain drilled the vertical shaft of its first shale well since 2011, when the country issued a moratorium on fracking following a series of small magnitude earthquakes. This week, Scotland energy minister Paul Wheelhouse announced that his country would extend its own moratorium on fracking indefinitely.

Wheelhouse pointed to an overwhelming negative response from the public, when asked for comment about fracking. He also quoted a study from a consultancy firm that concluded that fracking would have borderline negligible impact on Scottish GDP.

Both concerns—public opposition and a stunted economic impact—are legitimate. Shale is deeply unpopular in the UK, a problem that may undermine its development in England, despite the green light new exploratory drilling got earlier this year. Part of this issue stems from a difference in property rights: in contrast to the United States, where landowners also own whatever’s underneath their property (unless those rights have been previously sold), in Scotland, the rights to oil, gas, coal, gold, and silver are “held in the national interest.” As a result, few households atop a shale reserve in Scotland have any incentive to accede to the disruption that comes along with oil and gas drilling.

But the biggest problem for Scottish shale is geologic in nature: there just isn’t that much oil or gas to frack. According to the British Geological Survey, Scotland contains just 80 trillion cubic feet of shale gas, a far cry from the 622 trillion cubic feet here in the United States. The upside just isn’t there.

Add Scotland to the long list of countries where exporting the American shale experience has been unsuccessful. The U.S. energy revolution has been churning for nearly a decade, and yet commercial production elsewhere has been scant, despite the fact that vast reserves of shale gas and tight oil can be found around the world. The longer shale continues to be a uniquely American experience, the more we can appreciate just how many variables had to go just right to get it off the ground.

The post Fracking Fails in Scotland appeared first on The American Interest.