Heyco! Heyco! It’s off to work they go!
Questionable fracking claims are not exactly new, but we did think they might have gone away or at least been given a quiet retirement. After all, it hardly seems like 5 minutes since climate campaigners were celebrating the appearance of decommissioning equipment at Cuadrilla’s site at Preston New Road. Then everybody had a good laugh at Liz Truss’s attempts to emulate Donald Trump with her “We want drill, baby, drill” performance, and yet… here we are again!
Fracking Claims
Drill or Drop reports that a Texas based company, Heyco, who are the parent company of Egdon resources, shipped in their Chief Executive, Mark Yates, to give a presentation at the Lincolnshire Energy Conference on their shale gas asset in the Gainsborough Trough.
This is, we believe, the first time that they have openly admitted that they are targeting the shale there and would have to use fracking to access it. This is in spite of the existing moratorium on fracking.
During his presentation it was reported by Drill or Drop that Mr Yates made some rather extraordinary claims about the potential impacts of the resource which would appear to be based on an, as yet publicly unavailable, report called “The Gainsborough Trough Project” by Deloitte.
Chief among these claims, as reported by Drill or Drop, were that:
- There would be 36 years of production ramping up quickly with a long tail.
- Total forecasted production is 15.8 trillion cubic feet
- Enough total energy would be produced to power the entire United Kingdom for 6.7 years at current consumption rates
- 87% of UK gas demand could be met by Gainsborough in its peak production year
Are these claims sustainable?
I have some experience in modelling annual shale gas production, having previously created a model that mimicked the results of Cuadrilla / UKOOG 2019 modelling in their report “Updated shale gas production scenarios” , so I adapted my model to meet the new constraints provided by Mr Yates. The original report on which the modelling is based has been deleted from the UKOOG website but can still be accessed using the Internet Archive here.
I used UKOOG’s mid point estimate for Estimated Ultimate Recovery (EUR) of 5.5 bcf per lateral well and assumed that each well pad would accommodate 40 lateral wells. To achieve a total output of 15.8 tcf they would therefore require around 72 x 40 well pads, or 2,880 lateral wells. UKOOG’s modelling assumed that each pad would take 8 years to fully develop 40 wells on each pad.
This gave me a pattern of development which would ramp up quickly. it also allows the required production to continue for 36 years and generate 15.8tcf of gas.
I then calculated what this meant in terms of expected production per year based on UKOOG’s 20 year type curve which models the hyperbolic decline curve of each well drilled.
I then compared these to the forecasts for UK gas demand contained in the National Grid “Future Energy Scenarios” for 2022 which modeled demand out to 2050. I used the “Falling Short” scenario, which would appear to be the most likely given the current geo-political situation. For years beyond that I assumed (for the sake of expediency) that demand thereafter would be the same as 2050.
My Conclusions
This gave me some interesting results:
The claim that “87% of UK gas demand could be met by Gainsborough in its peak production year” would appear to to be impossible to sustain assuming UKOOG’s methodology is logical (which it would appear to me to be). The only way I could see that being modeled within the constraints specified would be to use a much lower demand forecast along with some extremely steep decline curves. which would both be totally unrealistic. How have they got to their result? We don’t know.
In my modelling it takes 12 years (2037) for the forecast production to reach just 44% of UK gas demand and it never gets higher as shown below.
I have tried other parameters, but none has any material impact on the issue at hand.
Even by modeling the building of ALL 72 well pads in year one (and drilling 2880 lateral wells in the first year would be a ludicrous proposition) I only get to 57% of UK demand in year 7 (2032) and the production stops in 2051, 10 years short of the lifetime the claim.
I could use a 30 year decline curve like the one Cuadrilla once showed from Edison, but this just stretches out the forecast production by the required 10 years and reduces the peak to just 47% of production.
It should be noted that some of the National Grid’s current (2025) scenarios do show gas demand falling very significantly by 2050 which might help the claims made here. However, those scenarios are not modelling a world where the UK government says “to hell with Net Zero, let’s get fracking!“. In that world even the new “Counterfactual” scenario probably underestimates likely demand, so there isn’t a “get out of jail free” card there in my opinion.
Incompatible Claims?
So, to cut to the chase I simply do not believe that it is possible to realistically model a scenario where 15.8 tcf of natural gas is extracted over a period of 36 years while meeting 87% of the UK’s realistically forecast natural gas demand in its peak production year.
The three claims would appear to be logically incompatible.
Without visibility of a methodology that supports them, then the conclusion has to be that these claims made together are unsustainable.
I’m more than happy for them or others to prove me wrong though and if they do I’ll be sure to update this article.
Another questionable claim
Finally I’ll turn to the claim that enough total energy would be produced to power the entire United Kingdom for 6.7 years at current consumption rates.
According to the US EIA The UK’s gas demand in 2024 was 2.5 tcf.
6.7 times 2.5 is 16.75 not 15.8. OK, you might say, so what’s 6% between friends, but hold on!
Gas usage accounts currently for only about 30% of the power used in the UK. The idea that this shale gas resource could “power the entire United Kingdom for 6.7 years at current consumption rates” is so misleading as to be ridiculous.
Meeting the UK’s gas demand is just NOT the same thing as “power(ing) the entire United Kingdom“.
It’s not as if we haven’t see this careless type of claim before.
I have called Egdon Resources to try to acquire a copy of the Deloitte report, but they declined to discuss it over the phone and directed me to email in a request. I have done so and I will update this article should the report arrive.
24 hours later I have had no response.
