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The lack of publicly available data on the UK's onshore oil and gas drilling means there are significant “unknowns” about the safety of future fracking wells, according to a new study.
“The research confirms that well failure in hydrocarbon wells is an issue and that publicly available data in Europe on this seems to be sparse,” said Professor Richard Davies of Durham University, who led the study.
 “In the UK, wells are monitored by well inspectors but there is no information in the public domain, so we don't really know the full extent of well failures. There were unknowns we couldn't get to the bottom of.”
While a lot of well data is made public in the US, it was not detailed enough for the researchers to distinguish serious and minor well failures.
“But in the UK we don't even have that,” said Davies, whose study was funded by the government and oil firms Total, Shell and Chevron but monitored by an independent academic board.
Tony Bosworth, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said:
“This report highlights that oil and gas well failure is widespread and the best way to avoid the risk this brings is not to frack or go after other hard to reach and polluting fossil fuels.”
In February, TUC warned that the known dangers of shale gas exploitation and the poorly understood risks of fracking processes meant the industry must be tightly regulated.
The highlights of the report which is available to download from the E-Library Database, or by clicking on the pic above:
•Oil and gas well barrier elements can fail.
•The percentage of wells with barrier element failure is between 1.9% and 75%
• Pennsylvanian shale wells have well barrier and failures rates of 6.3% or less
Source: TUC Risks
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