The study found that 42 per cent of people support fracking
Peter Byrne/PA
Ben Webster Environment Editor
More people support fracking than oppose it, according to a survey commissioned by Greenpeace.
The group, which is campaigning against fracking, tried to bury the inconvenient result in a footnote of a press release announcing the results of the survey.
The finding that 42 per cent of people supported fracking while 35 per cent opposed it is particularly awkward for Greenpeace because it shows greater support for the shale gas industry than government surveys have suggested.
Twenty-four per cent of people said they supported shale gas extraction in the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s latest Public Attitudes Tracker survey, published in February. A similar proportion (23 per cent) were opposed and half were undecided.
ComRes, the polling company, asked 2,035 people in the Greenpeace survey last month how much they supported fracking, which it described as a process where “natural gas is extracted . . . by drilling a hole, creating a tiny explosion to fracture the rock and then injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to allow gas to be released”.
It found that men (56 per cent) were almost twice as likely as women (29 per cent) to be in favour of fracking. Support was highest among people aged 65 and over, at 58 per cent, compared with 36 per cent among those aged 18 to 24.
Greenpeace chose to focus on the results of other questions suggesting that candidates in marginal constituencies in the general election will lose more votes than they gain if they declare support for fracking locally. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of voters said that they would be less likely to vote for candidates who backed fracking, compared with 13 per cent who said that they would be more likely to do so.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are asking candidates to sign a “frack-free promise”, but so far no Tory hopefuls have done so. A hundred Labour candidates have taken the pledge along with 104 Lib Dems, seven standing for UKIP and 402 for the Green party.
Ken Cronin, chief executive of UK Onshore Oil and Gas, the fracking industry body, said that “when presented with the facts about the safety and low environmental impact of shale gas operations, British people will support onshore oil and gas exploration.”
Greenpeace said: “Others may have decided not to publish [the findings] at all. We did put them in our release and they are publicly available.”
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