Minerals Local Plan Issues and Options consultation

Submission of Response to the Nottinghamshire County Council Minerals Local Plan by the Teversal, Stanton Hill & Skegby Neighbourhood Forum.

1. It is noted that p36 of the Plan proposes: A criteria based policy for hydrocarbons ensuring that a proposed development does not have any unacceptable impacts on the environment or residential amenity at each phase (exploration, appraisal, extraction) is considered appropriate to address future conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon development in Nottinghamshire.

Further, Q24 asks: Are you aware of any issues relating to hydrocarbon extraction that should be considered through the Minerals Local Plan review?

2. Our Forum submits that the Minerals Local Plan review should take into account the following issues:

A. The majority of hundreds of academic studies on the health and environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing for the exploitation of shale gas suggest the threats of water and air contamination are real. Nine professors of medicine and nine other senior medical personnel have called for a ban on fracking in the British Medical Journal http://tinyurl.com/shalestudies

This potential threat to community health goes well beyond the statement of 'unacceptable impacts on the environment or residential amenity' stated in connection with a criteria based policy, and the criteria based policy should be amended accordingly.

B. Developing a new gas field is a policy choice to continue to rely on natural gas, a cause of global warming, when we need to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible and take steps to radically reduce our need for energy. Methane leakages make this process worse for the climate than burning coal http://tinyurl.com/shaleclimate.

Developing new gas fields using hydraulic fracturing for the exploitation of shale gas has the potential for increasing green-house gas emissions at a time when national and local government are committed to implementing the COP 21 Paris Agreement on Climate Change and substantially reducing emissions. It is therefore submitted that the development of this type of gas field would quite clearly produce, through the generation of methane emissions, an unacceptable impact on the environment - as specified under the proposed criteria based policy -. Therefore any provision for this type of development is clearly unacceptable and should be dropped from the Plan.