“Giant gasfield” discovered in Lincolnshire – reports
Egdon Resources has discovered a “giant gasfield” in Lincolnshire, it was reported last night.
RUTH HAYHURST
The Daily Telegraph said the field, centred on the town of Gainsborough, could meet the UK’s entire gas needs for a decade, generate tax revenue and create tens of thousands of jobs.
Egdon’s chief executive, Mark Abbott, was quoted as saying the field was “potentially world class”.
The Gainsborough Trough was identified by the British Geological Survey as a shale gas area since 2013. It stretches between Lincoln in the east and Sheffield in the west and north towards Doncaster.
Egdon’s news could revive the debate about fracking for shale gas in England, currently prevented by a moratorium. The UK government promised in its election manifesto to ban fracking.
According to the Telegraph, Egdon calculated the field holds 480 billion cubic meters of recoverable gas.
This would be about seven times UK current annual consumption and, with falling gas demand, this could last a decade, the paper reported.
If confirmed, this would make the Gainsborough field potentially much larger than Shell’s Jackdaw field in the North Sea, estimated to hold 38 billion cubic meters, the paper added.
Deloitte, which has analysed the economic impact of developing the Gainsborough field, has estimated it could generate income of £112 billion, the Telegraph reported.
Neither Egdon nor Deloitte have made public statements today about the field.
According to the Telegraph, the discovery is to be formally announced at the Lincolnshire Energy Conference on 25 February 2025. DrillOrDrop will be reporting from the conference, organised by Lincolnshire County Council, at the University of Lincoln.
“Quietly investigating”
The Telegraph said Egdon had spent several years “quietly investigating the extent of the field, including test drilling”. The company had drilled to depths of 2k to find the gas, the paper added.
The most recent well drilled in the Gainsborough Trough area was in January 2019 at Misson in north Nottinghamshire. This was a shale gas well, drilled by IGas (now Star Energy), that reported “highly encouraging” results in 2019.
Egdon was a junior partner in the Misson project. The well was decommissioned in February 2024 after being suspended for four years.
Another Star Energy well, at Tinker Lane, on the edge of the Gainsborough Trough, also explored for shale gas in 2018. It was decommissioned in 2019 after failing to identify gas.
Egdon’s only recent drilling in Lincolnshire has been outside the Gainsborough Trough area and did not target shale gas.
The company drilled an oil well at Wressle near Scunthorpe in 2014 and at Biscathorpe in the Lincolnshire Wolds in 2019.
Egdon’s website reports it has interests in 13 current licences in the Gainsborough Trough area.
Of these, 12 are described as shale gas targets. Egdon is the operator of eight of the licences.
The company is currently challenging a refusal of planning permission for oil production at Biscathorpe. It is also planning a gas production site near the North Yorkshire village of Foxholes and is a partner in another gas scheme at Burniston near Scarborough. Egdon’s planning permission for expansion at Wressle was rescinded following a landmark climate ruling at the Supreme Court in 2024.
Egdon is privately-owned by the Dallas-based Heyco Energy Group, which acquired the company in September 2023. Since the acquisition, Egdon no longer needs to formally update shareholders about its activities.
The Gainsborough reports are just the most recent to predict potentially world class onshore oil and gas fields.
DRILL OR DROP?: continue reading
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Giant gas field discovered under UK that ‘could fuel the country for a decade’
KIT HEREN
A giant gas field has been discovered under Lincolnshire which could fuel the UK for a decade, an energy company has claimed.
Egdon Resources, the company behind the discovery, will formally announce the findings about at a conference later this month.
The company said the gas field, which has been discovered near the town of Gainsborough, would boost the British economy by over £100 billion, reduce reliance on energy imports and create tens of thousands of jobs.
Consultants Deloitte, who were hired by Egdon to analyse the results of its test drilling, said that exploiting the Gainsborough Trough field would have considerably less environmental impact than importing an equivalent amount of gas from abroad.
The newly discovered gas field contains about 480 billion cubic metres of gas, which is about seven times as much as the UK consumes in a year.
As British gas consumption is likely to decline in future, this is projected to cover the country’s gas needs for a decade.
But despite the advertised economic benefits, it would likely spark a new row as the gas would need to be extracted via fracking – which Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and many others in Labour and the UK oppose.
Fracking, a method of extracting oil and natural gas from deep underground, is behind the boom in US oil and gas drilling over the past decade, and is said to have given the country much greater energy security.
Critics say that fracking distracts from net zero goals and can create earth tremors.
The UK, which is committed to net zero by 2030, has among the highest energy bills in the developed world – impacting both households and businesses, including energy-intensive heavy industry.
Britain used to rely on its North Sea gas fields, but these are in decline. The UK now imports over half of its natural gas from abroad, including from Norway, the US and Qatar.
The Gainsborough Trough field is largely under lightly populated rural area of Lincolnshire, although it also extends north-west towards Doncaster and Sheffield.
Mark Abbott, Egdon’s chief executive, said that the test results from the Gainsborough Trough “compare favourably with US commercial shale operations and are potentially world class.
He added: “We could access all that energy from drilling pads on the ground above, each roughly the size of one or two football fields.
“The land take would be far smaller than for solar farms and the energy produced would be far greater.”
A government spokesperson appeared to play down the chance of the field being developed, saying: “We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations.”
LBC: continue reading
*****
The entire net-zero edifice is crashing to the ground
If we had a serious government, Ed Miliband would be campaigning in favour of drilling the gas under our feet – not blocking it
ANDY MAYER
The UK needs gas. We need it for heat: 85 per cent of UK homes use a gas boiler. We need it for power: around a third of which came from gas generation last year. Roughly half of the “capacity market” required to back-up unreliable renewables on cold dark windless days comes from 90 gas plants. We need it for industry, with the “clean power” alternatives still 3-4 times more expensive.
The Government’s net-zero ambitions don’t change this reality, nor will they for at least two decades. Those capacity market plants, for example, are all on 15-year contracts. Homeowners don’t want heat pumps, and the data centres required for AI need our energy system to grow, not shrink.
The UK and EU tested to destruction in 2022-23 the idea that we can rely on Russia to supply what we need. The price shock, and decision to underwrite prices, helped bring down Truss administration. This year we’re seeing even the Norwegians wobble on exports as supporting us is driving up their domestic prices. It is surely a statement of fact, then, that the UK’s energy security depends affordable supplies of gas. Yet we have some of the world’s most expensive energy, due to over-reliance on imports, and the failure of the alternatives to fossil fuels to live up to their promise to cut bills.
So great news, the plucky drillers at Egdon Resources, after years of tests, believe they’ve found a massive new source of supply, under our feet, in the East Midlands. Noting that early drilling estimates are just that, it is claimed it could generate over £100 billion in revenues, £27 billion in tax, “thousands of jobs” and reduce 218m tonnes of CO2 emissions by displacing imports.
Win, win, win, win.
A serious government, cheered on by a serious Parliament, would be bending over backwards to ensure Egdon can “drill, baby, drill” as soon as possible. Ed Miliband, our Energy Secretary, would be driving 50 miles south from his constituency, hi-vis jacket at the ready, to open the site. Sadly, he’s more likely to be standing with the single-issue anti-fracking campaign groups.
We are now more than two decades into a Parliamentary consensus that we must either leave gas in the ground, or make it so expensive to extract, that it amounts to the same thing. Net-zero is a moral crusade not a consideration of trade-offs with affordability and security, both of which are far more important to the public. They also find it hard to explain those choices to local residents.
Even when the politicians are supportive, the laws they’ve made allow Nimby councillors and judges to block or overturn permits on the basis of climate targets, absolutist environmental regulation, disproportionate planning and safety rules, and misapplied assertions of human rights.
Onshore hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, then is “banned” in the UK, while the offshore north sea taxes are so high that investors are fleeing Britain. The Government is starting to get the message on getting the state out of the way on nuclear power, but the logic does not extend to fossil fuels.
Simply lifting the moratorium would also be insufficient. There needs to be a wholesale shredding of the previous Governments’ efforts to try and reassure the public with the “highest standards in the world”, and a ruthless focus on delivery. This means consistent and limited regulation with other industries not special rules to fail to appease implacable opposition.
The only signs of anything like that being possible are currently coming from Reform, who have just five MPs, backbench Conservatives, and a few peers. But Reform now are using the same zero risk, pro-regulation tactics as anti-fracking campaigners to attack renewables, which will make building a consensus for serious energy security harder.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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