The oil and shale debate in pictures

Here’s a producing shale well

Here’s another wellhead

Brutes, eh? The horizontal drills far underground can cover 10 sq km. So you don’t need many of these to extract gas from a wide area.

Here’s Cuadrilla’s drilling site scarring the landscape – they are drilling, so their site is more crowded at the moment.

Finally, on this map each red pin is an oil or gas well drilled between 1902 and the present day.

Who knew?

The FT (£) tells us thirteen cabinet ministers have constituencies blessed with shale. Well, all right, the FT is serving up information from Greenpeace, so that’s not quite how they put it. You can see the details for nothing on the Daily Mail site.

This certainly is a blessing. They can’t cower behind their constituents’ ignorance, as Nick Herbert has done recently. Being senior ministers they will have to get themselves briefed, make the case for this flagship government policy, and show some leadership. They can’t duck it.