Hartshead’s Dash for Gas

Exclusive: 75 years of shale gas reserves found under Hartshead Pike

• Hartshead Pike tower to be converted to hydraulic fracturing drill;
• Wrexham-based fracking firm set to take over site at the end of this week;
• Former Colliers’ Arms public house to become company offices.

By Friday midday, Hartshead Pike’s tower could be obscured by well boring equipment, such as this example seen in 2014. Image by Day Donaldson (Creative Commons License – Some Rights Reserved).

Tameside could be sitting on a goldmine of shale gas reserves which is set to reverse the borough’s Cinderella tag. Following British Geological Society surveys, most of the borough has been identified as a hotbed of shale gas. Today, East of the M60 has learnt about the discovery of further shale gas reserves under Hartshead Pike.

A Fracking Good Move: Lancashire Tells Shale Gas Extractors To…

Preston New Road and Roseacre drilling operations kyboshed

• Traffic and health concerns key to rejection;
• But Government still sees potential for fracking elsewhere in the UK.

Lancashire County Council voted 9 to 3 against the hydraulic fracturing of a proposed site of Preston New Road. Having already voted against fracking in Roseacre, today’s news was a relief for anti-fracking protestors and local residents.

A Fool’s Overture of Jam Tomorrow and Cuts Forever: The 2014 Autumn Statement

‘The Island’s Sinking, Let’s Take To The Sky…’: East of the M60’s verdict on the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement

Back in the early 1990s, Salfordian musician and radio presenting legend Mike Sweeney used to have a slot known as ‘Message in the Music’. This featured on his morning show on Piccadilly Gold, and listeners were encouraged to find an appropriate song for that morning’s news stories. For example, an ideal song for the split of GM Buses in 1993 could have been Breaking Us In Two by Joe Jackson.

A Fracking Bad Move: The False Economics of Hydraulic Fracturing in Northern England

How fracking could have a ruinous affect on Northern England’s economy

“If we ruin the Earth, there is no place else to go. This is not a disposable world, and we are not yet able to engineer other planets. The coolest desert on Earth is far more hospitable than any place on Mars. The bright sandy surface and dusty atmosphere of Mars reflect enough sunlight back to space to cool the planet, freezing out all its water, locking it in a perpetual Ice Age. Human activity is blighting our landscape and our atmosphere, like this ultimately like an Ice Age here.

“At the same time, we are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the Greenhouse Effect. The Earth need not resemble Venus very closely, for it to become barren and lifeless. It may not take much to destabilise the Earth’s climate, to convert this Heaven – our only home in the cosmos – into a kind of Hell”.

– Professor Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980)

The North of England is an already deprived part of the world apart from some pockets of affluence in Greater Manchester, rural parts of Lancashire and Cheshire and North Yorkshire. It has seen its fair share of job losses, been at the sharpest end of the government’s public sector cuts, and in many cases, not seeing the fruits of Britain’s recovery.