Coldharbour Drilling Application

March 10, 2009 19:22 by dereks

I have started this blog as a place for us to discuss the pros and cons of the proposed drilling for oil and gas at Coldharbour.  Below are the contents of the emails on the subject to date between GMF members.  I have copied them all to this blog to enable any visitor to the GMF site to join in.  I have edited the emails slightly for readability.
I suggest that this blog is not the place to discuss the impact of drilling on the local area.  The following website is the place to do that: http://www.thevirtualvillage.com.  The virtual village web site contains this statement: “All you need to know is 30 HGVs per day via Knoll Road”.  To my mind that illustrates the parochial mindset of many objectors.  Let’s use this blog to develop better arguments and think of more than just the immediate impact on local people.  This is definitely NOT all you need to know!
Derek Smith
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As some of you may already know, plans are afoot for an oil well on Leith Hill. Bizarre as it may sound, a company has lodged a Planning Application to carry out some exploratory drillings. As you can imagine, a number of local residents and users of the area have got a bit upset by this, and have set up a campaign website here
 http://www.thevirtualvillage.com/oilwell.cfm,
 with details of the plans and how to object to the application. Not that we're trying to form your political opinions for you, in fact you may think it sounds like a super idea, in which case we'd recommend setting up a pro-oil well website before the protestors put a stop to it. If on the other hand, the idea of having this as a back drop to your Sunday morning ride doesn't sound great, then you may want to visit the website above and raise your objections.
Cheers, The Head For The Hills Team
Head For The Hills
43 West Street, Dorking, Surrey, RH4 1BU
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Isn't this a tricky one? Should Transition Dorking support this since it might reduce dependence on non-local resources?
Matt
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Please ask your contacts to visit TheVirtualVillage.com to support the objectors to the oil and gas exploration application.
Paul
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Matt is right this is difficult – I would argue that:
Transition Dorking exists to provide a framework for people to undertake projects to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, minimise our impact on the environment and create local resilience. I do not think Transition Dorking can have a position on an issue like this. We are a self selected, not a representative, group; we have no idea what the views of our mailing list supporters might be much less the wider local population. Individual members of Transition Dorking can no doubt express their views as individuals.
My view as an individual is I have to say deeply ambivalent. I find it hard to see the moral justification for objecting to something like this while continuing to use oil based products, which may well have originated in other parts of the world where many local environments, and communities, have been devastated. This is in order to provide us with a comfortable lifestyle in our own unspoilt environment.
Andy
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I sent my email to GMF members, not to Transition Dorking and all I said was:
 “I'm sure you'll be interested in this bit of news and may well want to throw your oar in.  I will do a blog on it.”
The ‘you’ here are the various GMF members initially and then any GMF website visitor if they read the blog.  It seemed to me that our blog pages could provide a good forum to help people sort out the best response on this.  In fact, now I’ve had a look at TheVirtualVillage.com, I’m more convinced of this.  This web site already has lots of content, 100% from angry locals from what I can make out.  I noticed one ‘we don’t want to burn oil or gas because of climate change’ comment, but all the rest is NIMBY stuff.
My gut reaction is that I want UK to reduce its ghg emissions as fast as it realistically can – to zero in 20 years – and start now.  The rest of the world then follows suit and global oil and gas demand falls dramatically.  On this rosy scenario, we don’t need to discover any more new oil and gas fields.  We live on the existing ones until we don’t need them any more.  So we certainly don’t need to run the spoil some nice countryside for the possibility of a small new oil or gas find.
That’s what I’d like to happen but we have to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be.  In reality the UK is likely to be importing oil and gas for a long time, and probably throughout the life of the Coldharbour field.  If it turns out to be a gas field, this will likely power a local electricity generator and feed into the grid.  Dorking could maybe set up a company to sell this to the grid and thus benefit the whole community.  Sounds quite good?  If it’s an oil field, it will be too small for a pipeline and so the oil will probably have to be sent by road tankers to the nearest refinery – Esso Fawley I imagine.  That does not look so attractive.   I imagine it’s more efficient overall for the oil to be imported in a small corner of a supertanker.
If this had arisen a year down the line with Transition Dorking well established, people would be expecting Transition Dorking to have view I think.  At first sight it looks illogical if TD on the one hand has a (local) energy descent plan, and on the other supports an increase in local energy supply. But there is no conflict really between Dorking reducing its energy demand and increasing its supply.
We could air these sorts of arguments on the GMF website, as they will get completely drowned out on TheVirtualVillage.com I suspect.
Derek
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Very interesting issue this.  I thought Andy's response was very helpful and Derek spells out the dilemma in more detail.  I was afraid most of the reaction locally would be of the NIMBY variety and it sounds like this is the case.  Like Derek I would like to see us cutting our dependence on oil and gas - or at least all the dependence which generates greenhouse gases which I suspect is nearly all the uses we currently make of it and like Andy I think we should accept that if we use oil or gas products we should not complain if their production impinges on our local amenities.  It would seem best to me to advocate checking the existence of the oil or gas and then registering it and saving it up for future use for essential needs locally, when technology has been found to use it without having to transport it miles for refining or whatever.  It could be a life saving local resource for the future inhabitants of the area.  We are currently profligate in our use of these resources and to ruin a beautiful landscape in order to get a bit more to waste seems wrong.
Anne
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I have also been asked if we would take position on this issue and help with the campaign so I think we definitely need to blog about it.
I share the ambivalence, first I was outraged at the destruction of yet another part of beautiful Surrey but the people of Surrey use a lot of the planet's resources... so it would be good to gently point that fact out and it might be an opportunity to invite people from the virtual village.com to join the CRAG.
Esther
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To Anne
You say “It would seem best to me to advocate checking the existence of the oil or gas and then registering it and saving it up for future use”.  Just to clarify, the present proposal is for a exploratory drilling only – ie checking for the existence of oil or gas and nothing more.  If they find it’s commercially exploitable, they will then have to apply separately for a licence to operate as a production field.  TheVirtualVillage.com blog says that the likelihood of it being exploitable is about 1 in 10.
Derek


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Categories: Campaigns | Energy

Comments

March 10. 2009 19:36

Another argument has occurred to me.  Suppose that the planning application was for a community owned wind turbine power generator, something that Transition Dorking would very likely want to support.  A lot of the arguments being used by the drilling protestors would apply equally to a wind turbine.  We should not allow NIMBY arguments to take centre stage.

dereks

March 12. 2009 12:50

It has been suggested that we should not use the term NIMBY in this discussion, but rather talk of local or immediate concerns.  Presumably this is because NIMBY is a very pejorative term, implying that protesters are putting their own interests ahead of the needs of society, and that their objections are selfish rather than principled.

I used the term NIMBY quite deliberately with this criticism in mind.  Obviously there is nothing wrong with someone being concerned about how the noise, traffic etc might affect them personally.  But if that is the only concern, and there is no concern about the impacts on other people, then that to my mind is a NIMBY attitude.  Almost all the comments on the virtual village website are about the impacts of the proposed drilling on local people.  If people have thought about any wider impacts, they haven’t said so.  My cynical assumption is that most haven’t given it a thought.  I return to the statement on the website “All you need to know is 30 HGVs per day via Knoll Road” which gives the game away.  This blatantly displays the NIMBY attitude – no concern for anything other than local impact.

Derek Smith

March 25. 2009 21:11

Coldharbour drilling update

The virtualvillage website gives links to interviews with the would-be site developers and Leith Hill Action.  I’ve now listened to these and so learnt more about the proposed projects.  I’ve also thought a bit more about the economics of all this and so time for an update.

The developers are talking of drilling for oil rather than gas.  Drilling will be in Forestry Commission land and will only last 5 weeks.  Including construction and removal from site makes the total period 18 weeks.  The Environmental Impact Assessment found that traffic to and from the site will be the main problem and so there will be a lorry convoy system when kids are at school.  If the field become a production field, the oil processing site will be near the A24, away from the hills.

Leith Hill Action accepts the need to replace declining oil supplies from the North Sea, but don’t want an oil site in their area (or even back yard!).  Their main worries are damage by heavy lorries to roads and woodland.  The website says that the drilling site will be “restored” following drilling.  The quotation marks around restored imply to me that the protestors do not think the drilling site really will be restored properly, but they don’t give any arguments.

I have checked the numbers and North Sea oil production is declining very fast.  We will soon be importing more crude than we produce in the UK, if we’re not already, and the proportion will rise fast.  Similarly on a global scale we either are, or soon will be, in ‘peak oil’ and we can expect to see severe oil shortages and high prices within a year or two.  The economic and security value of secure, low cost UK oil will be enormous.  The protestors seem to accept at least some of this, but appear to think that the benefit to the UK economy is less important than avoiding 18 weeks of disruption to a few hundred people.

In my view, the main argument should not be ‘we don’t want drilling here’, but ‘we don’t need drilling anywhere’.  But we can only seriously make the second argument if the UK can somehow drastically reduce its energy demand.  That is what is desperately needed to tackle climate change but frankly it does not seem very likely.  The classic NIMBY argument that ‘we don’t care where it goes, we just don’t want it here’ is selfish and unprincipled.

I suggest Transition Dorking could argue to the protestors ‘Be part of the solution, not part of the problem’.  We need to drill for oil because our energy demand is far too high, and so our lifestyles are the problem.  We have to move to a low carbon, more localised and self-reliant economy.












Derek Smith

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