Conservative-controlled Nottinghamshire County Council is looking at options to ensure IGas restores the Springs Road shale gas site at Misson.
The site has been mothballed since 2019 and has had no planning permission since councillors refused to extend its life in July 2021.
The company declined to appeal against the refusal.
But with the lifting of the moratorium on fracking in England last month, Misson residents have sought assurance that restoration would still go ahead.
The work must be carried out before the end of January 2023 to protect birds in the adjacent site of special scientific interest.
In a letter to Cllr Richard Butler, chair of Nottinghamshire’s planning committee, a group of residents, said:
“We … respectfully but firmly request that you pursue this issue as a matter of urgency, if necessary, implementing a restoration order to ensure the work is completed in a timely manner.”
They referred in their letter to a message last month from IGas development director, Ross Glover, who said:
“Until we have further clarity from government on what the various announcements mean, we are not bringing forward any concrete proposals.”
In his reply to residents, Cllr Butler said he was aware of comments made by IGas about shale gas. He said:
“The mothballed exploratory site at Misson Springs no longer has planning permission and the requirement to restore the site remains in place and is unaffected by the recent national announcements.
“The County Council is expecting to see IGas commence restoration works very shortly and options to take this matter forward and ensure the restoration of the site, if this is not advanced, are being looked into.”
Previous communication between council planning officers and the local campaign group, Frack Free Misson, indicated that a rig for plugging and decommissioning the well had been booked for October 2022.
Cllr Butler said the council would keep villagers informed if it received a start date for the work.
A majority of people in Misson have opposed IGas’s plans and operations at Springs Road.
Misson Parish Council and Bassetlaw District Council, along with local wildlife organisations and more than 70 people, objected to the extension of the site’s life. There were no public comments in support. The county council’s planning committee voted to refuse by 12 votes, with one abstention.
IGas restored another Nottinghamshire shale gas site at Tinker Lane in 2019 after the well failed to find the Bowland Shale.
DrillOrDrop invited IGas to comment on the correspondence.
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DRILL OR DROP? 
According to the latest population data there are over 700 people detailed as living in Misson. “More than 70” is a little over 10%.
The more than 70 people referred to here, who you claim are a little over 10% of the population of Misson are simply those who objected to the extension of the site’s life, with no public comments in support. The ‘majority of people in Misson ‘ referred to in Ruth’s piece are those who have opposed I gas plans and operations at Springs Road which is a different matter.
“There were no public comments in support” – that’s 100%.
We are constantly reminded – as here – that Colly-arithmetic (like Trussonomics) requires, to work, the necessary suppression of one of the two elements of a calculation. This is a sine qua non: without it traditional arithmetic (or economics) continue to apply, eg one centre of pollution plus another = two sources of pollution.) In turn, this suppression depends upon a doctrine of supply and demand which negates the possibility of supply stimulating demand. The doctrine denies, for example, that the abundance of supply ( of a useful pollutant, for example) can (and does) encourage demand, which in turn provokes supply.
Such suppression is of course intellectually dishonest, and we would do well to adopt the default position, rejecting out of hand observations based upon figures emanating from either of the two suspect branches of pseudo-science listed in my first sentence.
What a pickle. I wonder how much of what we hear about fracking is actually true? An awful lot of the renewables story seems to have been hyped up, for example, just as there has been a concerted campaign against nuclear. Imported LNG includes an awful lot of embedded carbon from liquefaction and shipping, and much of it comes from US shale anyway. The US has fracked extensively for decades, turning itself into the world’s largest producer. I wonder what percentage of the residents of the Permian, Bakken, Eagle Ford, etc were/are against it. At any rate, it looks like we need to buckle up for a couple of very difficult winters, followed by a long term economic decline.