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".

Wilson has concerns about how stakeholder engagement on this issue has developed in the UK and believes fracking operators would do well to conduct more thorough engagement projects.

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’.

People

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

Contact

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