Engineer with 20 years in oil in gas. He is cited in the Royal Society 2012 report on shale gas and helped develop the 10 recommendations that the Royal Society produced. He is currently an expert adviser to the EU Commission on shale gas. His area of expertise is regulation of shale gas and has written a number of papers on the subject, most recently in The Lancet in June 2014.
Edited transcript of his presentation
I wrote a paper about the Royal Society review two years on and in that paper I concluded that only one out of 10 of those recommendations had actually been implemented. I presented it at an Institution of Engineering Technology conference with the president sat there to Professor Paul Younger, one of those report authors, and he accepted that 90% had been ignored.
On to hydraulic fracturing. Is it new? I thought hydraulic fracturing was first executed in 1998 in the US in Texas. Denton, one of the birthplaces of fracking, banned the practice two weeks ago. So fracking is new. What we are all calling fracking now, what the media is calling fracking is new.
Original hydraulic fracturing began in Kansas in 1947. It used pressures of around 200 psi [pounds per square inch], a thousand gallons of water, very high recoverability rates of about 75%, no chemicals at all, one well per pad.
High volume hydraulic fracturing uses pressures up to 20,000 psi, 6m gallons of water, recovery rates very low, typically around 5% (95% of the gas remains in the ground after fracking), up to around 600+ chemicals, in lateral sections (horizontal wells) with up to 40 per pad.
So it is a bit like comparing the local corner shop to Walmart. Both sell food, both are in the retail trade but the impact on the local community is a little different. In the fracking game, size mattes.
So I would say in the UK at this point in time one well has been fracked. The DECC yesterday confirmed that to me. It is a few miles from my house in a village called Weeton, near Blackpool. It got to stage five out of 12. It caused 48 tremors, two of which were above 1 on the Richter scale, one at 1.5 and one at 2.3. It damaged the well over a significant interval and it was shut down. Since then it has suffered a well integrity failure.
Is it [fracking] regulated? No it is not regulated and it is not inspected. The present regime is nowhere near sufficient to mitigate the very severe risks from fracking to the public health and the environment. The US at the state level does have some very good regulations coming in. We don’t, we’re not regulated.
The Lancet article that I wrote on the health implications of fracking was vetted by the journal very closely. It took three months to get it printed and five rewrites. They were happy when they printed it that it was 100% accurate. And in that article I concluded that there was a 30% increase in birth defects if you live within 10 miles of a fracking well. That could be all of us very soon indeed. There was a 38% increase in cancers and congenital heart defects. These are peer-reviewed studies for institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Colorado School of Public Health, not institutions you can easily ignore. They were based on large studies: 124,000 births, pre-fracking in 1996, during fracking and post-fracking up to 2009.
There are no shale gas specific regulations or unconventional fossil fuel regulations at all, apart from the traffic light system [for seismic monitoring] and yet the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering called for those regulations to be put in place. They don’t exist. The regulators do not have the time and the money, in the case of the Health and Safety Executive, and the people in the case of the Environment Agency with the right experience to regulate this industry. Hence the one, and only, well to be fracked in the UK suffered a double failure. It was damaged over a large interval and had a well integrity failure.
The Environment Agency failed to check any chemicals added at the surface and failed to verify the quantity of flowback flowing up the well. When I asked them OK how do you know of what that is?, they told me “We ask Cuadrilla”. That’s the verification process you have got here.
They also failed to understand about abandonment. They’ve informed me that they will not monitor the wells for 30 minutes after they are abandoned. So in my case of PH1 at Weeton that well is being abandoned by Cuadrilla in April next year. The Environment Agency will no longer monitor that well after April next year. It needs to be monitored for 30 years.
The Infrastructure Bill, currently going through the House of Lords, and on to the House of Commons in an amendment just added, allows for any substance to be pumped into that well as long as previously they have tried to extract gas or hydrocarbons from it. Those substances, I was shown by Professor Mike Stevenson of the British Geological Survey, an experiment they were doing on reverse fracking. Once the gas had been sucked out, they were going to pump in other things – carbon dioxide, nuclear waste.
Why do I say the flowback is toxic? If you put Marks and Spencer pure Scottish mineral water down the well (and we don’t know what they are putting down because the Environment Agency don’t check, but let’s say they do and it is true pure water), what you get up – and I got the Environment Agency to check this on the well near me – is lead at 1,438 times the safe level for drinking water, cadmium at 150 times, arsenic at 20 times, chromium 636 times, aluminium 197 times and radioactive sludge at 90 times the maximum safe level. That’s what the CEO of Cuadrilla, Francis Egan, calls non-hazardous. I’d like to see him drink it.
What we get is life style degradation, gridlock, noise, [loss of] air quality, light, financial loss, jobs, businesses, tourism. On the Fylde, my area, we are expecting to lose about net 10,000 jobs when fracking comes to town. We get food all sourced from outside Lancashire because none of the farms will be able to produce in Lancashire when it comes. We get house values falling and, of course, we get public health issues.
Everything is a balance in life, fair enough. We need the gas. I don’t deny that. We can get about 5% – and I’ve discussed this with the DECC – of our annual gas needs from shale gas. So therefore energy security no. We’ll still need to get 95% from other sources.
It is a balance. Whatever your view, I would say, how many additional birth defects is fracking worth? If we’re going to get an extra 1% or 2% or even 5% of gas out of the ground how many birth defects is it worth. You have to decide because fracking causes birth defects and serious birth defects where the infants die before the age of five. If you say none, you’ve just banned fracking.
DRILL OR DROP? 
In the “debate” Mr Hill twice mentioned that shale gas wells would be used for disposal of radioactive waste. It is in the above transcript. This is an old allegation from him that was debunked by the British Geological Survey back in 2012. I quote from the BGS website “Concerns have been raised about the possible future use of shale gas boreholes for disposal of radioactive waste. Boreholes drilled for shale gas or for any other purpose will not be re-used for the disposal of radioactive waste.
2012-11-05”. Mr Hill should desist from perpetuating this scaremongering meme of his.
I note also from the transcript above and from my own recollection of the “debate” that Mr Hill kept repeating the birth defect accusations – very scary stuff!!!!!. Mr Hill cites the Colorado School of Public Health as one of his sources. I challenged Mr Hill on this. This is what Dr. Larry Wolk, the CDPHE’s Chief Medical Officer and Executive Director, said about that report (I read an excerpt on air the following day on BBC Radio Kent)
http://energyindepth.org/mtn-states/colorado-health-department-disavows-activists-favorite-fracking-researchers/
On personal invitation I was asked to help advise in a small role regarding geological aspects on this very carefully produced atlas.
http://www.envhealthatlas.co.uk/homepage/
Its methodology is a gold standard in looking at epidemiology and geographic distribution of disease & risk in relation to environment.
Nick, I note you are silent on Mr. Hill’s assertion that 9/10 of the Royal Society’s recommendations from 2012 are yet to be put in place. With regard to the Colorado study, there are no “accusations”. What there are is preliminary findings that require further research before conclusions are drawn. It would seem prudent to allow such further research to be carried out before further HVHF was carried out. You seem rather quick to try to rubbish these findings. Why is that?
In the “debate”, Mr Hill claimed that Preeshall 1 had two integrity failures. The first being associated with the earth tremor in 2011 – I pointed out that it was the part of the well that sits within the shale zone and is designed to be perforated- that portion of the well buckled – it is not an integrity failure. The second he claimed was to do with the recent pressure rise in the annulus. I pointed out that this does not constitute an integrity failure and that the EA was involved with the operator. Mr Hill claimed that it from the HSE that he had evidence that the well’s integrity has failed. Perhaps Mr Hill can publish the evidence he has from the HSE. This is what the Minister said in Parliament yesterday 25th Nov 2014.
“The energy minister, Matthew Hancock, said a shale gas industry would encourage jobs and growth, and replace coal.
He said regulation was “undoubtedly stronger than the regime in the US”, citing the “4,500-page” environmental impact assessment by Cuadrilla for its proposed shale gas wells at Roseacre Wood and Preston New Road in the Fylde. He added that guidelines were, in themselves, a form of regulation.
On monitoring the Preese Hall well, he said: “The well did not fail and the HSE have made clear they are satisfied by the steps taken by the operator to deal with the small pressure that was detected.””
A blogger called “clens” has posted this on the canterbuty Times website
Statement from the EU Commission: ” Mr Hill cannot speak in the name of the Commission.
He is an active expert on shale gas, and a member of a Technical Working Group working on the review of EU rules on the management of extractive waste, but as representative of the civil
society. He is not currently advising the Commission per se, he is representing stakeholders’ views in this Technical Working Group managed by the Commission.”
So on the basis of the above statement he is not an Advisor – but is representing stakeholder’ views. Judging by my posts above in response to his innacurate and false claims made at Canterbury, he may be representing a particular stakeholder group, but he is misrepresenting the facts about himself and shale gas.
Ruth, I do not think that Mike Hill is a Dr. He claims BSc, MIET C.Eng, all of which are valid, but Dr is not anything that I heard him claim. He did misrepresent his status at the EU, as Nick Riley has confirmed.
Thank you – my mistake not Mike Hill’s. I’ll check and correct.
“Dr” (where does that come from) Mike Hill says there are no regulations regarding shale. He is lying. One simply needs to search for the term “PON9b” to see the shale specific regulations on page 7 of the document. If Mike Hill says these are not regulations, then he is effectively saying that the industry he works in does not follow any regulations for any drilling as PON9b is only one part of a whole suite of regulations.
Thank you – my mistake not Mike Hill’s. I’ll check and correct.