Huge oil find within the Tory heartlands/Sunday Times

A NEW onshore oil bonanza could be on the horizon with vast potential resources found under a swathe of southern Britain, possibly on a par with the huge shale gas reservoirs found in the north.
Scientists from the British Geological Survey (BGS) are putting the final touches to a report on the oil-bearing shale rocks that stretch from Weymouth in the southwest to the Weald in the southeast and up through Oxfordshire.
The report focuses on the Weald area spanning Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and Surrey and is expected to say that its rocks are just as rich in oil as the North Sea strata that have been producing oil for the UK since the 1980s.
Some geologists estimate that the area could hold reserves equivalent to a third of those under the North Sea, although they emphasise that this would need to be confirmed by test drilling. The report will also say that oil found in such rocks would have to be extracted by fracking — the controversial technique where pressurised water is used to split rocks to release their hydrocarbons.
The report, commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), is likely to prompt a flood of applications when the department opens the next round of licences later this year.
The government will also be acutely concerned about the potential backlash from communities in such traditionally Conservative areas if they are faced with dozens of fracking applications — especially with an election coming next year.
The report was commissioned as the counterpart to one published last year covering northern England. This found enough shale gas in the Bowland Shale formations of the northwest potentially to supply Britain’s needs for up to 40 years. It said: “Other areas in the UK have shale gas and shale oil potential and later in 2013 the Jurassic shales in the Weald Basin of southern England will be the subject of a further BGS/DECC study.”
The new study was designed partly to see whether there was shale gas under southern England too, but the scientists say oil is the big potential discovery. This is because the rocks under the Weald have mostly never reached the higher temperatures needed to turn buried organic matter into methane.
Some energy firms are already convinced. Europa Oil & Gas plans to sink exploratory wells in an area of outstanding natural beauty near Dorking, Surrey, and is fighting legal protests by the Leith Hill Action Group. Cuadrilla, another drilling firm, faced a similar reaction when it tried to drill exploratory wells at Balcombe in West Sussex.
“The discovery of oil in the Weald should not be a surprise because there is already a number of small oilfields around the North and South Downs and also oil seeps,” said Richard Selley, professor of petroleum exploration at Imperial College London, who will advise the DECC on its report.
“The amount is likely to be less than under the North Sea, which is a far larger area, and it is not yet possible to be clear about the figures because we don’t know how much of what is down there. But it is clear that these rocks have a high oil content.”
The same rocks already hold Europe’s biggest onshore oil field at Wytch Farm, in Dorset, whose 400m barrels of extractable oil have been exploited since the 1970s.
Earlier this month Alastair Fraser, professor of petroleum geoscience at Imperial College London and who helped to develop the Wytch Farm field in the 1980s, told the Shale UK conference that the similar rocks lying under southern Britain would probably also contain “significant quantities of oil”.
“At least 100 test drillings have been done across this region looking for conventional gas and oil and our re-examination of the samples shows they contain a lot of oil which could be extracted by fracking,” Fraser said.
“If we extract this oil it will help to fill the gap left by declining production in the North Sea. It will create jobs, energy security and a better balance of payments. The chancellor will be delighted, too.”