Frackers’ case

THERE are costs and benefits to everything in life. But Andrew ­Eaton-Lewis’s rant (“How dare the frackers label me an extremist”, Perspective, 28 February) about coal gasification and fracking concerned only supposed costs and failed to mention the benefits from cheaper gas for heating and transport fuel, reductions in fuel poverty, security of supply and freedom from arbitrary control by wayward regimes of our energy ­supplies.

I would be more sympathetic if he had shown some awareness of the detailed investigations on unconventional gas supplies already carried out or that he appreciated that carbon capture is much more easily applied at a gasification well-head, than on the top of Longannet.

It is easy to trawl the web, find a couple of marginal cases and then, by implying these are routine, frighten an uninformed public without explaining the benefits or the very rare frequency with which these events occur. Hundreds of thousands of world-wide investigations have shown underground coal gasification using deep seams and fracking using deep shale are entirely safe technologies that provide enormous benefits to the communities that use them.

I live in Penicuik in which earthquakes are frequent but very rarely noticed even though most exceed the level of regulatory control on those allowed by fracking. (There is a table in the Scottish Government report.)

The opposition to unconventional gas technologies arises from the imagined belief that humankind can survive without fossil fuels or nuclear energy; it can’t. But we do also need governments that lead and are not cowed by a loud but uninformed minority.

(Prof) Tony Trewavas

Scientific Alliance Scotland

North St David Street

Edinburgh

I HAVE read with much amusement the writings of many on the subject of Longannet Power Station and its threatened ­closure. Behind each letter there is a thinly veiled political stance, with selective myopia used to argue this point and that.

No-one has raised the fact that with generation, distribution and sales all now in private hands, a partly devolved government and carbon reduction requirement, past policies are completely wrong. The location of generating capacity can no longer be arranged simply based upon proximity to the centres of one population i.e. London, but has to be based on geographic necessities. Dams, tidal barrages, wind turbines and even nuclear power stations are all located far from centres of population.

Would it not therefore be far more sensible to calculate charges on the distance a consumer is from the generator and not some artificially chosen single location? This would surely provide a more sustainable model while still encouraging generation close to consumption. Users would then pay on the basis of their remoteness from the source and not the generators remoteness from them.

Marek Mozolowski

Sandport

Kinross, Perth & Kinross