Energy firm to begin work on closing fracking site

Energy firm Cuadrilla has announced it will start work on plugging the UK's only two shale gas wells in February - around two months after the deadline for doing so passed.

The site on Preston New Road, Blackpool, was the country's first horizontal fracking site but the process was banned in 2019 after more than 120 tremors were recorded during drilling.

Environmentalist groups and local communities staged lengthy anti-fracking protests.

The two wells were meant to be decommissioned by midnight on 8 December 2024 or the firm would be in breach of Lancashire County Council's planning laws.

Cuadrilla said work to plug the wells and remove valves and surface pipework would begin in "the second half of February" and was expected to take approximately six weeks.

The firm said it would be moving equipment onto the site at this time following formal notification from regulator, North Sea Transition Authority, that the two wells must be plugged.

A Cuadrilla spokesperson said they would be removing tubing from one of the two wells and, once completed, "the rig required for the bulk of the plugging and abandonment operation will arrive on site".

"We currently expect the rig to arrive towards the end of February," they added.

In October, residents living near the site spoke of their frustration at the time it was taking to dismantle the site, expressing concern that the firm would miss the deadline.

In December, Lancashire County Council told the BBC it had "powers to compel a landowner or operator to comply with conditions to a planning permission".

A spokesperson said the council had been in discussion with Cuadrilla in recent months as to how the restoration of the site could be progressed.

The BBC has approached Lancashire County Council for comment.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves drilling into the earth and directing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals at a rock layer, to release the gas inside.

Cuadrilla had previously said fracking would create jobs in the north of England and "help tackle spiralling gas prices".

But the process of injecting fluid at high pressure into the rock can cause tremors, which is what happened in Lancashire, resulting in the practice being banned.

Cuadrilla, which had already been given a two-year extension to dismantle the wells and restore the land, was also told the site must be returned to agricultural land by June of this year.

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