The UK Oil & Gas Authority (OGA) has ordered Britain’s only two horizontal shale wells to be plugged and abandoned, the operator of those wells, Cuadrilla Resources, has revealed.
Cuadrilla’s parent company, AJ Lucas, announced that Cuadrilla will permanently seal the two shale gas wells drilled at the Preston New Road (PNR) Lancashire shale exploration site, Cuadrilla highlighted.
The company noted that this means the 37.6 trillion cubic meters located in the northern Bowland Shale gas formation will continue to sit unused. Cuadrilla outlined that just 10 percent of this volume could meet UK gas needs for 50 years.
“At a time when the UK is spending billions of pounds annually importing gas from all corners of the globe, and gas prices for hard-pressed UK households are rocketing, the UK Government has chosen this moment to ask us to plug and abandon the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain,” Cuadrilla’s chief executive officer, Francis Egan, said in a company statement.
“Cuadrilla has spent hundreds of millions of pounds establishing the viability of the Bowland Shale as a high-quality gas deposit. Shale gas from the North of England has the potential to meet the UK’s energy needs for decades to come, yet ministers have chosen now, at the height of an energy crisis, to take us to this point,” he added in the statement.
“Once these wells are filled with cement and abandoned it will be incredibly costly and difficult to rectify this mistake at the PNR site,” Egan went on to say.
When asked for comment on Cuadrilla’s latest update, the OGA told Rigzone it cannot comment on individual cases. The organization did, however, provide the following quote:
“The OGA expects licensees to manage their redundant well stock responsibly, including by the timely plugging and abandonment of non-producing wells”.
Rigzone has asked industry body United Kingdom Onshore Oil and Gas (UKOOG) for comment on Cuadrilla’s update but has not yet received a reply.
Earlier this month, UKOOG’s policy manager, Charles McAllister, had noted that the organization “questions the wisdom of the UK’s over-riding reliance on imported natural gas and oil to fuel the transition to a net zero economy”.
“We believe that policy makers should instead encourage increases in indigenous production of the UK energy resources, onshore and offshore,” McAllister said in a UKOOG statement back on February 3.
“An increase in UK natural gas production is fundamentally logical because it can provide much needed tax revenues to fund decarbonization projects, and by adding an additional source of domestic supply, UK onshore natural gas can further reduce the extent of the UK’s exposure to international spot market for gas delivery,” McAllister added in the statement.
In November 2019, the UK government revealed that fracking would not be allowed to proceed in England “following the publication of new scientific analysis”. Ministers were said to have taken the decision on the basis of a report by the OGA.
PNR is located in the parish of Westby-with-Plumptons, in the Fylde, Lancashire. Cuadrilla notes on its site that it was granted planning permission in October 2016 to develop PNR as a temporary exploration site with permission to drill, hydraulically fracture and test the flow of natural gas from up to four horizontal wells. In 2018, Cuadrilla completed drilling the UK’s first two horizontal shale gas wells.
The OGA regulates and influences the oil, gas and carbon storage industries, the organization’s website states. It also holds the industry to account on halving upstream emissions by 2030, according to its site.
To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com
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