More than four billion barrels of oil could be present in shale formations lying underneath Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire – although it is doubtful how much of it could ever be recovered through fracking, according to a long-awaited government study. Research by the British Geological Survey assessed the shale oil and gas potential of the Weald Basin, an area stretching underneath the Home Counties, including the South Downs National Park. It concluded that shale formations in the basin could contain between 2.2bn and 8.5bn barrels of oil with a mid-case estimate of 4.4bn – which would be equivalent to approaching a decade of UK consumption. But the geologists, commissioned by the government to assess the potential reserves, played down the prospects for an onshore oil and gas bonanza in the area because of the difficulty of extracting it. Robert Gatliff, director of energy and marine geoscience at the […]