YP Letters: Shale gas and fracking could mean self-sufficiency of our energy needs

THE country’s gas storage capacity has recently been considerably reduced.

Drax power station intends to use gas for some of its electricity generation, thus increasing our dependence on imports (potentially from Russia).

Do we really want to put national security, not to mention the effect on the balance of payments at such risk, when it is said we could possibly be self- sufficent?

I do not recall protests when coal-fired power stations, and a coal mine, were built in the Selby area. They were more prominent and, as proven, more polluting than fracking.

From: Jarvis Browning, Main Street, Fadmoor, York.

IT’S brilliant that The Yorkshire Post is making this wake-up call on fracking in Yorkshire. Like Scotland and Wales, England should ban this process.

The Yorkshire countryside will never be the same again. Money will never repair the damage it might do. Whatever that might be, we will never know, only when and if it ever happens, heavens forbid!

From: David Cragg-James, Stonegrave, York.

‘NIMBY’is used primarily as a term of abuse, and yet I suspect most opponents of shale exploitation naturally start out as ‘Nimbys’ before further thought and reading expand ‘my back yard’ in their awareness to ‘my planet’.

Unfortunately your leader (The Yorkshire Post, January 27) diminishes the concerns of activists. The ‘conundrum’ is not whether to safeguard either Britain’s energy supplies, or our “green and pleasant land”, but whether England’s fossil-fuelled trajectory should be allowed to trump efforts to arrest planetary pollution, global warming and its attendant climate catastrophe.

From: Michael Farman, Willow Grove, Beverley.

MY opposition to fracking is based on my experiences as an engineer while working for 18 years under contract to NASA.

I was involved with several failure investigations, and have reached the conclusion that no major engineering project can be considered failure-proof.

No doubt the Health and Safety Executive will monitor the first fracking tests, but Government economic policy has drastically cut their numbers so eventually, with large numbers of wells, they would of necessity rely on self-reporting by the fracking companies.