Cuadrilla’s former fracking site in Lancashire passed a milestone event this morning.

A workover rig left the mothballed site near Blackpool after apparently decommissioning the UK’s only onshore horizontal shale gas wells.

The rig, which has been at Preston New Road for 11 weeks, was transported out at about 11am.

Local campaigners, who have opposed Cuadrilla’s Preston operations for more than a decade, were delighted to witness the rig leave.

Cuadrilla has not made any public announcements about the decommissioning work, nor updated the Preston New Road community liaison group.

If the work to plug and abandon the two Preston New Road wells has been completed, it is more than five months behind schedule.

The deadline to finish the operation, set in planning permission from Lancashire County Council, was 8 December 2024.

Cuadrilla now has just 13 days to return the well pad to farmland to meet the next planning deadline of 8 June 2025.

The company has repeatedly said it would comply with the restoration schedule. But local people have been highly sceptical that it would meet the restoration deadline.

A spokesperson for the local campaign group, Preston New Road Action Group, said:

“The departure of the rig hopefully means that the plugging and abandonment of the wells has, at long last, been completed.

“However, it is clear that the site is not going to be restored by the 8 June so once again, and unsurprisingly, Cuadrilla will have failed to meet their obligations.

“As Cuadrilla had previously told the Community Liaison Group that it would take 12 months to restore the site, starting the work three months before the deadline was wildly optimistic.

“It will be interesting to see what, if any, penalties Lancashire County Council will impose.”

Preston New Road made national headlines in August 2019 when Cuadrilla’s fracking operation caused a 2.9 ML earthquake. This was the largest seismic event induced by onshore fracking in the UK.

The industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), immediately ordered Cuadrilla to stop fracking operations at the site.

Just over two months later, the then Conservative government introduced a moratorium on fracking in England, which remains in force.

In August 2023, NSTA ordered Cuadrilla to decommission the Preston New Road wells.

The regulator had previously given Cuadrilla more than a year to evaluate options and produce “credible plans” for the re-use of the wells.

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