David Smythe

Frackland

An archive of the Frackland blog 2014-2019

I ran a Wordpress blog, Frackland, from 2014 to 2019. It comprised just 22 posts, but often quite lengthy and technical. I think they have stood the test of time well, even though they were designed to be ephemeral or topical for the epoch. Instead of setting up a new Wordpress site after moving my web pages to a new ISP, which would be too complex, I have now made the 22 blogs available (with their accompanying comments if present) in the form of pdfs, accessed through the links below. Some of the blogs have been reconstituted from incomplete Wayback Machine archives, and lack the original Wordpress formatting. However, the text and images have been preserved to match the original. I have grouped the blogs by their main subject matter, as follows.

James Verdon is an academic geophysicist at the University of Bristol. He has also consulted for the government and industry.

The commentator in the first post above, to whom I gave short shrift, has been around for fifteen years or more. He is typical of the inadequate, right-wing, climate-denying, half-educated blogger, apparently with nothing better to do than post frequent comments on newsworthy or often trivial items. Verdon himself is discussed further in my page here about the unscrupulous behaviour of some earth scientists.

The following posts concern mainly Cuadrilla, the company which operates in Lancashire:

Dr Nick Riley is a geologist who retired from the British Geological Survey, then set up a consultancy specialising in the Bowland Shale of Lancashire. Lord John Browne, onetime CEO of BP, was chairman of Cuadrilla in the early 2010s. The third blog above predicted that there would be trouble with earthquake triggering (which turned out to be correct), and the fourth blog highlights the technical deficiencies of the company in dealing with the induced seismicity.

Politics and regulation were discussed in the following blogs:

Nick Grealy, who died in February 2018, was a pro-fracking journalist and would-be shale gas operator. Witney is the parliamentary constituency of David (now Lord) Cameron. When he was prime minister his constituency was inexplicably omitted from the areas offered for new hydrocarbon exploration licences. The third and fourth blogs above discuss the inadequacy of the regulations and definitions of fracking in the UK.

Drilling in the Weald, SE England, is discussed below:

Lastly, evidence on the technical inadequacies of Professor Paul Younger of the University of Glasgow, is discussed below, along with the attempts by himself and his colleague Dr Rob Westaway to have me silenced:

Paul Younger died aged 55 in April 2018. Rob Westaway died prematurely in August 2021. More commentary on Younger is provided in a separate web page.