Fracking firms give up on Spain in victory for clean energy advocates

Fracking is rarely popular, but in Spain opposition has been particularly fierce.

Spain may not always get the best of press right now in terms of energy policy.

This is the country, lest we forget, that has opted to “tax the sun” following an overly generous solar power support scheme a few years ago that was supported with glee by homeowners happy to install solar panels on their rooftops and receive a rather nice feed-in tariff (FIT) from government…

Since those heady days of 2008-2011, Spain’s government has sought to reel in its financial support of solar power, and the situation now is of some homeowners with solar panels installed having to pay a tax to feed it to the grid.

This was obviously not the intention. As for larger solar farms, Spain has plenty, wind farms too, but renewables alone cannot meet the energy needs of this vast country. At least not yet.

Enter stage left: fracking. The controversial technique used to extract natural gas from deep in the earth has transformed the USA’s energy sector, helping the country to drastically reduce its oil imports from the Middle East and Africa, and even allowing it to export excess energy.

The hope was that Spain could follow suit. Projections from fracking companies estimated that the country was sitting on €700 billion in natural gas reserves that could only be got at via hydraulic fractured drilling, ie, by injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into deeply buried rock to extract the gas through a pipe.

The method is highly controversial, with people living close to fracking sites in the USA complaining of polluted water, earthquakes and even fires. Hence, opposition to fracking was strong from the get-go in Spain.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy passed a law in his previous term allowing fracking to be carried out, and five leading US fracking firms duly arrived to begin their explorations.

But, Spain being Spain, the natives were restless. Wherever one of these firms put a pin in a map, severe opposition immediately arose from a series of environmental and energy groups, who blocked each initiative at every turn.

This week, those groups – which include BNK, Heyco, R2 Energy, San Leon and SHESA – are celebrating as it was confirmed that all of the five firms that arrived in Spain with the intention of fracking have now left.

Which means that Spain still has to find new ways to secure its energy future, but with all that natural gas set to stay in the ground, perhaps the PM will be tempted to turn his attentions again to renewable energy…