With the race heating up to exploit whatever volumes of shale gas reserves Europe may possess, the various potential stakeholders in the UK continue to jockey for position in estimating how much unconventional gas could be slumbering beneath the island's crust. The latest to raise the stakes is Cuadrilla (Lichfield, Staffordshire / UK; www.cuadrillaresources. com), the only company to have carried out tests with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking on British soil. At the recent "Shale UK" conference in London, Huw Clarke, senior well site geologist for the company's Bowland shale operations, estimated that there could be 330 tr cubic feet (cf) or about 9.2 tr m~3 of gas in place in its licence area near Blackpool in Lancashire.
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