Pollution at fracking protest site rises despite lack of fracking

Despite fracking failing to get started at a gas well in the North of England, company's lorries, police vehicles and protesters' wood fires have combined to drive up air pollution levels near the area.

Operations at the Kirby Misperton well in North Yorkshire have been delayed after the operator Third Energy ran into financial problems. Nevertheless the project's local pollution impact has been revealed by Government supported research.

A professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York, Alastair Lewis, said his air quality monitoring project found a group of pollutants had increased in the vicinity of the site to levels normally seen in a city rather than a rural area.

Lewis discovered the main causes were:

• lorries supplying the well, were producing the largest, most visible impacts above the surface on nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the use of compressors, generators and truck movements;
• opposition by campaigners, such as slow walking in front of lorries supplying the site, and burning of wood by protest camps, would have driven up NOx levels;
• police operation and police vehicles have been a significant source of the pollutants, with North Yorkshire police spending more that £600,000 on policing protests on the site over the Autumn and Winter period of 2017/18.

As a result Lewis commented that the above causes "shifted a semi-rural location into a chemical environment that looked more similar to a city suburban environment for NOx".

However he did add that the levels did not breach regulatory limits, and the full research will be published in due course.

Steve Mason, who lives near the well and a campaigner for Frack Free United, said he was extremely concerned that air quality had been impacted. 

"If the air quality of rural Yorkshire can be turned into that of a city environment by preparatory work for a single well that was never even fracked, imagine the impact if there are thousands of fracking wells strewn across our countryside, which is what the industry is planning to do".

If the shale gas industry scales up to a national level with 400 wells, NOx levels would increase by up to 4%, according to an earlier Government report.