SLR Consulting

SLR is an international environmental consultancy that specialises in the energy, mining and minerals, waste management, planning and development, infrastructure and industrial sectors. It has offices in Europe, North America, Australasia, and Africa.

Activities

SLR has been involved in the US shale gas scene for a number of years. Its technical director Hamish Wilson says the firm has benefited strongly from shale gas extraction there, having opened an office in West Virginia to support companies working on the Marcellus shale, with some clients having “pretty much outsourced their environmental risk management to the company".

In the UK, Wilson has serious concerns about how stakeholder engagement on this issue has so far evolved. Interaction with the public has mainly been in the hands of PR companies - he says however that fracking operators would do well to conduct much more thorough stakeholder engagement projects using consultancies with experience such as SLR.

It worries me a lot that, as many of the potential operators in the UK are quite small, I don’t think many are handling the public relationships very well – so much so that I am concerned they’ll screw it up and shale will be dead for another decade.

The public perceives a substantial amount of risk, which means any future work done in shale in the UK has to be carried out to absolute tip top standards. There mustn’t be a hint of aquifer damage – if the public gets a sense something has not been done quite right, it will blow up in the operators’ faces. For example, we saw how much angst there was following the earthquakes on Cuadrilla’s patch, despite most geologists saying they were relatively trivial.

...The obvious question [from the public’s point of view] is ‘fracking can cause pollution, there’ll be trucks rumbling past, what’s in it for me?’ And the industry has yet to come up with an answer – not even ‘here’s some money’.

Where , Wilson believes the experience of environmental consultancies in similar projects with similar goals means SLR – and others – are more suitable for the job.

People

• Stuart Metcalfe
• David Sandbrook
• Hamish Wilson, Technical director.

Contact

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