“FRACKING is just another tool in our toolbox,” said John Dewar, operations director for Third Energy, which is behind the application for fracking being debated by North Yorkshire County Council today (May 20).

Other companies including Cuadrilla and INEOS also hold licences to frack in North Yorkshire and are expected to lodge planning applications in due course.

Mr Dewar has been working in gas extraction in North Yorkshire for the past 20 years. Third Energy already extracts gas from four gas fields beneath the Vale of Pickering.

While other companies wishing to frack in North Yorkshire will need to drill fresh wells, Third Energy is applying for permission to use one of its existing wells for fracking. It hopes to extract shale gas from its existing KM-8 well, which was drilled in 2013 to extract gas using conventional methods.

Fracking would involve using that well to pump water and chemicals underground at high pressure to shatter rock formations deep underground and release gas.

“This well is already there," said Mr Dewar.

"All we’ve proposed is an eight week programme to test the flow of gas. It’s two weeks of getting the well ready to allow the fracking fluid to go in and the gas to come out.

“We have drilled 20 wells in this area without complaints or concerns, but suddenly, with the addition of the “f” word it sparks objection. But it’s equivalent to me building a house and then wanting to paint the outside of it.”

He added: “I wouldn’t be doing this if it couldn’t be done safely. Of course people will object when fed wrong information; I would be scared as well if I believed just a tiny bit of what has been put in the press - cancer, earthquakes – I would be writing lots of letters to the press every week and taking to the streets with banners.

“The only reason we have the public against us is because the public hasn’t been given both sides of the argument.”

He added: “We have seven well sites within the Vale of Pickering and nobody knows they’re there. We’ve achieved that without industrialisation. Our well sites are very well screened, they don’t take up much space and as you drive past them on the road you would be hard pressed to know where they are.”

Many of the protests over fracking have originated from fears that it will pose a danger to health or the environment, including some well-documented cases in the US where drinking water has been contaminated.

Ken Cronin, chief executive of UK Onshore Oil and Gas (UKOOG), which represents the oil and gas industry, said the UK fracking industry would operate under much tighter regulations than operations abroad.

He said: “I think a lot of fears come from some of the stories that people have read about the US, where there have been isolated incidents and things haven’t gone according to plan.

“Part of the reason is they have a very different regulatory system in the US compared to the UK.

“In the US when they brought the water back up they tended to store it in a massive lagoon on site. That allows it to go everywhere; from the water into the air, or sometimes cattle get into the lagoon - that’s not allowed in the UK.

“In the UK when the water comes back up it’s stored in a double-skinned tank on a protected area of land. That tank needs to have an environment permit approved by the Environment Agency and is monitored all the time. There’s no possibility of anything escaping because of the regulation in this country."

Other fears have centred on cases of earth tremors at fracking sites, including one which occurred at a test drilling site near Blackpool.

“There have been 2.5 million fracks in the world and there have been three known incidents of earth tremors," said Mr Cronin.

"The one in Blackpool was 1.3 and 2.3 on the Richter scale. That’s the equivalent of a bus going past a house.

“During fracking we’re putting water down at high pressure.

“If the water hits a little fault one and a half miles underground, it might cause the fault to oscillate and that oscillation could be magnified by the water.

“So now we have a monitoring system that monitors earth movement and if it reaches 0.5 on the Richter scale we stop and investigate what has happened. It’s a pretty failsafe scenario.”

So what implications does fracking have for the country’s future energy needs?

“About 15 years ago we were producing all of our own gas from the North Sea," said Mr Cronin. "Today we’re importing about 50 per cent from places like Qatar and Russia. In another 15 years it will go to about 80 per cent.

“So we have a choice; do we produce our own gas or do we rely on others to produce it for us?”