Extracts from an article by Edward Robinson published Friday 25 April 2014 by The Washington Post
“Shale gas could be very, very important for this country; it could be transformative,” says Browne, 66, who’s now chairman of Cuadrilla Resources, a British exploration firm that plans to frack the English countryside. “It’s like the opening of Alaska or western Siberia or the Gulf of Mexico.” Even as evidence mounts that fracking operations drain aquifers and spew methane into the air, energy firms are fanning out across mammoth shale deposits in China, Russia, India, South Africa, Australia and Argentina. Royal Dutch Shell has joined forces with China Petroleum & Chemical, or Sinopec, in China to exploit the world’s largest shale-gas-laden formations. Even relatively small Britain is sitting on a gas mother lode. The Bowland-Hodder formation, a belt of shale that stretches across Britain’s midsection, holds more than 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the British Geological Survey. That’s almost the same size as the Marcellus deposit under the Appalachian Mountains, the No. 1 U.S. shale gas find.