A bare patch of land amid the wheat and barley fields and cow pastures of northwest England’s countryside has become the focus of a question vexing Europe: to frack or not to frack? This week, the hub of the debate is the Lancashire County Council, which heard from both sides Tuesday, and is expected to decide Wednesday whether to allow the first onshore hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in Western Europe since 2011. The controversial drilling technique has unleashed an oil and gas boom in the U.S. in the past decade, but it has proved politically toxic in Europe , where lawmakers have blocked it. Fracking, which uses a mixture of sand, chemicals and water at high pressure to crack open energy reserves buried deep in shale formations, has been on hold in the U.K. after a series of minor earth tremors followed the first well fracked here […]