Task Force on Shale Gas report says that a UK shale gas industry could create thousands of jobs but more exploratory work is required to determine exactly how much gas is economically recoverable. The emergence of a shale gas industry in the UK would create thousands of jobs for the country, but presently-available predictions of job creation and likely benefits to the UK’s trade balance have been made with “less than ideal” amounts of factual data coupled with guesswork. So says the ‘Final Report’ from industry-funded body The Task Force on Shale Gas. The report notes that the estimated number of new jobs that would be created by a UK shale gas industry ranges from 74,000 for the whole industry to 5,333 in the northern economy without a supply-chain hub. But it concludes that a sufficient number of exploratory wells be drilled, hydraulically fractured and tested in order to […]