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19 July 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

If fracking is just oil which needs tax breaks to compete, what’s the point?

If George Osborne likes expensive energy, at least renewables are carbon neutral.

By Alex Hern

George Osborne has announced that the fracking industry is to be taxed at significantly lower levels than the rest of Britain’s extractive industries. The Guardian‘s Terry Macalister and Fiona Harvey report:

The Treasury has set a 30% tax rate for onshore shale gas production. That compares with a top rate of 62% on new North Sea oil operations and up to 81% for older offshore fields.

The oil industry has high levels of taxation because natural resources are considered collective property: the state owns all oil, gas, coal, gold and silver in the UK. That means that the oil companies ought to make a profit on the extraction of the oil, but not on the ownership of it. In practice, the distinction is long forgotten, but the high tax rates (and requirement for a license before exploitation begins) keeps the spirit alive.

The discount on shale gas production – or “fracking”, as it’s more commonly known – is to make what might otherwise be an uneconomical method of extraction slightly more business friendly. As such, the question which needs to be asked is whether we actually want this extraction to be business friendly or not. If, as seems likely, we already know about more conventional oil and gas than we could actually burn, then the business case for fracking is irrelevant: we should not extract those fuels, because we should not burn them.

Obviously, George Osborne, several years on from “vote blue, go green“, doesn’t particularly care about climate change, so that argument isn’t going to hold. But there’s a curious disconnect between the rhetoric around fracking, even from its supporters, and the practice here.

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Fracking was supposed to be the end of peak-oil fears. Rather than running out of easily extractable oil, and being forced to switch to renewables, we can instead make the most of the rising oil price to use more expensive methods of extraction. That puts off the switch just a bit further into the future, and lets another generation of politicos bury their heads in the sand. (Alright, supporters of fracking don’t include that last bit)

But if fracking needs financial support to be competitive with conventional oil then it’s not really anything other than a more expensive way to dig up fossil fuels. And if we want more expensive forms of energy, we already have some which are carbon neutral and can’t run out. Why would we want fracking against them?

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