Environmental groups are threatening to fight a semi-permanent fracking ban by Germany’s coalition government, claiming the proposal does not go far enough.
German industry wants to keep the door open to fracking, arguing it will lower energy costs, but Germany’s green activists continue to foment fear that fracking hurts water supply.
The country will allow test drilling with the permission from the government, officials said.
The compromise legislation — which was hashed out between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the left’s Social Democrats (SPD) — demands the German parliament reassess the policy within the next five years, in 2021.
“The coalition’s agreement on a fracking permission law is hair-raising. The law must be stopped and replaced with a true fracking ban,” Hubert Weiger, who heads the environmental group Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), said in a statement.
Despite the concern, studies continue to show that fracking does not have any discernible negative affect on local water supply.
The researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington collected and analyzed well-water samples in Texas near the state’s natural gas wells four times throughout the year to monitor quality. They found contamination of the water was “variable and sporadic, not systematic,” according to a press release. The scientists also found that whatever contaminates would likely dilute in any nearby aquifer.
Germany currently allows for some unconventional fracking measures, though no permits have been issued thus far.
If Germany’s parliament does pass the ban, which seems all but likely, then it will join France in becoming the second country to ban shale oil development.
France banned fracking in 2013 due to objections from environmentalists – the country still gets more than 40 percent of its natural gas from the U.S.
The ban was not enough for greens, as France’s energy minister, Segolene Royal, announced in May his desire to explore a moratorium on natural gas imports.
“I’m going to examine legally how we can prohibit the import of shale gas, and in any case, these businesses will have to shift towards other markets to import only conventional gas,” Royal told lawmakers at the time.
Imported natural gas is quickly becoming one avenue Eastern European countries are using to move away from fracked gas used and produced by Russia, one of the major natural gas producers in the region.
Russia, which supplies roughly half of Europe’s imported natural gas, used interruptions in the natural gas supply in 2006, 2009 and 2011 to place pressure on countries like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states.
Meanwhile, the U.K. went the other direction in May, approving the first hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, permit for natural gas in Western Europe since 2011. Energy groups believe fracking in the U.K. will create 74,000 new jobs and protect another 100,000.
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