A four-year-old company is to outline plans to the public next week on extracting billions of cubic feet of gas in a remote and sensitive part of the North York Moors.

Scarborough Energy has produced fliers about its proposal for gas production at the existing Ebberston South wellsite, near Dalby Forest.

The company is hosting a drop-in meeting on Thursday 9 July at Ebberston Village Hall. The meeting is due to last four hours, from 3pm-7pm. Members of the project team are expected to attend.

A consultation by Scarborough Energy runs from Thursday 9 July to Friday 31 July. This does not replace a formal public consultation when a planning application has been submitted, validated and published.

A website mentioned in the flier, where people are invited to see more information, was not working at the time of writing. The web address, ebberston-consultation.online, could not be found and was described as “not secure”.

Scarborough Energy, incorporated in 2022, has one director and holds no UK onshore or offshore licences, according to official data. Its company address is listed c/o an accountant’s office in Leeds.

Previous information about the scheme, which plans to use an existing well, was produced on Scarborough Energy’s behalf by the planning director of Egdon Resources.

Egdon, owned by the US based Heyco Group, is currently applying to drill for gas at Foxholes, also in North Yorkshire.

Neither Scarborough Energy, Egdon nor Heyco has a formal stake in the Ebberston licence, PEDL120, according to information from the industry regulator. PEDL120 is operated and 100% owned by Ineos Upstream Limited.

The Ebberston South site is almost entirely in the North York Moors national park. It is inside a buffer zone surrounding the darkest skies of the park’s International Dark Sky Reserve.

The wellsite is 400m from the Troutsdale and Rosekirk Fens site of special scientific interest. It is also next to the Oxmoor Dikes scheduled ancient monument, an earthwork dating back to the bronze age.

Information previously revealed that Ebberston South wellsite was estimated to produce 7 billion cubic feet or 143,509 tonnes of gas from 2027-2032. Daily extraction was forecast at more than 107,000 cubic meters.

Combustion of the extracted gas would result in 430,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, Scarborough Energy estimated.

The scheme includes a 1.53km pipeline from the site to the national gas network. The land needed to build the pipeline, known as the working width, would be 30m.

No drilling would be undertaken but a workover rig would be mobilised to reinstate and complete the existing well for long-term production. The tallest structure on the site would be an enclosed ground flare of 8.25m.

In January 2026, DrillOrDrop reported that government officials had ruled that the Ebberston South proposal for gas production and a pipeline would have “significant environmental impacts”. Officials described it as an environmentally-sensitive area.

The direction on behalf of the local government secretary concluded that the application must include a detailed environmental impact assessment. The North York Moors National Park reached the same conclusion but this had been challenged by Scarborough Energy.

The site is close to the Tabular Hills regional walking trail and part of the pipeline route is directly on the trail, which links to the nationally-designated Cleveland Way. Dalby Forest is a well-used recreational area, from which the project would be visible in places.

Meeting details

Thursday 9 July 2026
3pm-7pm
Ebberston Village Hall
56 Main Street, Ebberston YO13 9NS