Frack boss: ‘We’ll give away billions’

Allan Campbell, the founder of Cuadrilla Resources, says he wants to put money back into the communities which will have fracking on their doorstep.

The process of hydraulically fracturing rock involves pumping millions of gallons of water and chemicals underground to release gases.

Cuadrilla had operated a well at Anna’s Road, in Westby, but they have not fracked on the Fylde coast since 2011.

Mr Campbell, who claims the company has discovered 200 trillion cubic feet of gas underground in Lancashire, said in an interview this weekend: “This isn’t our gas, it’s the people’s. But there is so much gas that we can give the supernormal profits to the people it belongs to – the people of Great Britain. We want to give away billions.”

Mr Campbell proposes to take a chunk of the tax the Treasury could earn from shale gas drilling and put it into green technologies.

“We should reinvest it smartly for the benefit of your kids and their kids and their kids...whether that’s in skills or new technologies or whatever,” he added.

“And that should be for the people to determine in accordance with an agenda for their own self-sustainability.”

Fracking has been met with opposition on the Fylde coast. However, in the new year, the company hopes to start a “big conversation” on fracking.

This would see Cuadrilla host meetings in town halls in a bid to address fears over the industry’s environmental impact.

Mr Campbell added: “I am not opposed to the opposition; I think it’s a really good thing.

“But this has got to be an informed decision and at the moment there is a vacuum of information being filled with hyperbole that has no foundation in facts.”

A spokesman for Cuadrilla said that the plan to give away billions are the views of Mr Campbell, not necessarily the company as a whole.

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