July 15: Who to believe amid fracking claims and counter-claims in Kirby Misperton?

WELL done to North Yorkshire County Council planning department for the diligence shown in not validating the Third Energy planning application and also identifying the many omissions and errors within it (The Yorkshire Post, July 11).

Too bad our new MP for Thirsk and Malton did not demonstrate the same rigour before simply repeating what he had been told by Third Energy about well pads being six miles apart, a distance that would have excluded all of their nine existing sites.

This has now been shown as the fiction most of us knew it to be, when, at a recent public meeting, Third Energy stated they would not be developing 19 sites, as previously declared by them to the Commons Select Committee, but only their existing nine sites. Strangely, all of these nine sites are within this so called six-mile exclusion zone.

Do Third Energy know what they are doing, or do they not want us to know?

Now I read that our MP is calling for a change in planning regulations to enforce the six mile zone.

This suggests a failure to understand the stipulations of the PEDL exploration licence granted to Third Energy by the Government requiring them to maximise recovery of gas and together with the technical limitations of fracking, meaning well pads would be a maximum three to four miles apart.

So who is fooling who? With a mix of the gas industry funded by Barclays Bank and an estate agent-turned-politician, it is hard to know who to believe.

Certainly I hope that when the NYCC members get together to decide on the resubmitted planning application, I trust they will demonstrate the diligence of their planning officials and the courage of Lancashire County Council if the whole of Yorkshire is not to become an industrialised zone, riddled with deep bore holes, ripe for all kinds of toxic flowback fluids to be reinjected and the potential of hazardous waste to be buried both during and after the fracking.

From: Simon Sweeney, Glebe Cottages, Sheriff Hutton, York.

WHILE the local impact of fracking is rightly a huge concern, the key issue is that shale gas is a fossil fuel that would add to CO2 emissions and contribute to climate change.

This must be avoided. We should focus on energy conservation and developing renewable energy technologies.

Shale gas is a dangerous short term distraction, as well as a serious pollution threat.