Last week the government released details of new areas for drilling applications (including 53 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, backtracking on an earlier promise) and made a surprising announcement to “call-in” local decisions that were taking too long. But a lot has changed over the past eight years and opponents should still feel hopeful.

The most dramatic change for the energy sector has been a fall in natural gas prices. From a peak of 73p per therm (a unit of heat from gas) in December 2013, the price halved last summer, and now sits at 41p.

At such a price, it is entirely possible that few, if any, fracking sites in the UK will be profitable (see this week’s graph). In the US, shale projects are operating at a loss and capital markets are abandoning the technology they had recently been so aggressively funding.

The supposed environmental case for fracking has also taken a hit. Estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from fracking continue to be revised upward with another study published this week on methane leakage, while a recent study on US greenhouse gas emissions found fracking’s suspected impact on carbon cuts non-existent: it was economic recession, rather than a switch to fracking, that lowered emissions.

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