Ineos Shale, UK-based exploration and fracking arm of Swiss-based Ineos group, on Jan. 10 announced it planned to legally challenge Scotland’s permanent moratorium on fracking, as it warned when the decision was announced in October 2017. Ineos will argue that the effective ban is unlawful.

The chemical producer said it believes there were “very serious errors” within the decision-making process, leading to an effective ban on onshore unconventional oil and gas extraction throughout the country. These included “a failure to adhere to proper statutory process and a misuse of ministerial power.”

Ineos said it would pursue the challenge in conjunction with its “co-venture partner,” an operator ironically named Reach, but unrelated to the European chemicals legislation of the same name. 

In a statement, Tom Pickering, operations director of Ineos Shale, said the company had wasted two years for the temporary moratorium to end, in the hope of being able to start exploring. This wait has been costly to Ineos, other businesses “and indeed the nation as a whole,” he remarked, “as well as dealing a major blow to Scottish science and its engineering industry.”

Ineos Shale argued also that the decision “raises an important strategic question about how Scotland does business,” as all investment up to now “has been rendered worthless.”  In several permitting rounds organized by the UK central government, the Ineos group has nailed down the lion’s share of fracking licenses issued for Scotland’s Central Belt near the cities Edinburgh and  Glasgow, and its Grangemouth chemical complex, as well as for central England.

With a ban on all forms of  shale extraction in place, “Scotland will miss out on the numerous economic and employment benefits that will be enjoyed by England,” Pickering said. He added that the northernmost UK nation can effectively say goodbye to the creation of an estimated 3,100 Scottish jobs as well as the estimated £1 billion local communities would receive from a healthy shale industry.

Scottish energy minister, Paul Wheelhouse, said, however, the government “has taken a careful and considered approach to arriving at our preferred policy.” In a public consultation conducted from 2015 to 2017 – the two years in which the moratorium was in place – 99% of the 60,000 respondents favored making the ban permanent.

By a vote of 91 to 28, Scotland’s parliament in November then embedded the fracking freeze in its long-term National Planning Framework, to assure that it could not be easily reversed. The irreversibility stance is what Ineos’ legal experts are likely to want to challenge.

After claiming initial successes in England, the chemical group is now starting to see increased resistance from conservationists in the midlands, where it also holds a large number of exploration licenses, but no fracking permits.

While Ineos asserts that landowners and local communities have been very receptive to its exploration plans, which it stresses are non-invasive, the National Trust conservation charity has rejected all attempts at drilling on its lands.

The Trust recently wrote to Ineos Shale, asking it to abandon plans to survey one of its estates, the Clumber Park nature preserve.  The UK firm currently holds a license to carry out pre-fracking tests in Nottinghamshire and is leaning on the charity to grant access.

Ineos contends that the Trust’s opposition is “overly and overtly political” and has appealed to British authorities to intervene.

In a letter that she said was a personal appeal to stop the application, Clumber Park’s general manager, Beth Dawson, invited an Ineos representative to visit the vast wooded estate to see the ‘”nature-rich oasis” firsthand.