Germany's gas industry is turning up the heat on the new coalition government to drop its reluctant attitude to shale gas exploration in the country. With energy prices rising, the gas companies - not the only stakeholders unhappy with national energy policy - says their competitiveness is at stake. What's more, they possess cutting-edge technology that they are unable to fully leverage.

"Currently, there is a decline in domestic production, as a major share of planned investments in our industry is stymied politically," said Hartmut Pick, spokesman for the WEG oil and gas industry group that produces domestic gas worth €4-5 billion euros annually. "If this trend is not countered, it will have negative consequences for jobs, mining royalties and the basis of service industries," he added.

Ten years ago, 20% of Germany's natural gas consumption was covered by its own resources, today it is only 12%, the gas lobby said. This, it contends, raises not just the dependency on imports from Russia and Norway but also means more carbon-intensive coal usage.

Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences (BGR) two years ago estimated the country's shale gas potential at 0.7 trillion to 2.3 trillion cbm. A median exploitation rate could preserve the current 12% share of local gas use for 100 years, the institute said.

""It would be foolish not to look," spokesman for BASF energy subsidiary Wintershall, one of the principal advocates of a stepped-up approach to exploration in Germany, told the news agency Reuters.

"While shale gas development through hydraulic fracturing is new to Germany, the technique has been used in the country since 1961 to allow gas production from low permeability, or 'tight' sandstone reservoirs," a spokeswoman for ExxonMobil's German operations said.

Complementing fracking, horizontal drilling that makes it more efficient, advanced later, but has been in wider use to unleash local tight gas in Germany since the 1990s, players note.

In May of 2013, four months ahead of national elections, the cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel abruptly postponed a vote postponed on creating a legal framework for exploration as it seemed the bill would not gain the support of even Merkel's own party and its then-coalition partner Free Democrats.

As the new grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats finally goes to work, a spokesman for the economics ministry said research to analyze the effects of fracking would be conducted, and that the federal states, academia and companies would be included in the discussion. He declined to give a time frame, however, stressing that mining licences are a domain of the state administrations.

"If Germany and other European countries do not try and tap their shale gas potential, they will likely have to pay higher gas prices in future than would otherwise be the case," Dan Yergin, a U.S. energy advisor and vice chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told Reuters.