Fracking in the United Kingdom

Fracking is a well-stimulation technique in which rock is fractured by a hydraulically pressurized fluid. It requires a borehole to be drilled to target depth in the reservoir. For oil and gas production, hydraulically fractured wells can be horizontal or vertical, while the reservoir can be conventional or unconventional. After the well has been drilled, lined, and geophysically logged, the rock can be hydraulically fractured.

Fracking in the United Kingdom was claimed to have started in the late 1970s with fracturing of some 200 onshore conventional oil and gas wells. The technique attracted attention after licences were awarded for onshore shale gas exploration in 2008. The 200 wells claim had been made by a joint report in 2012 of experts from the Royal Society and Royal Society of Engineering, but turned out to be misleading, in that small-scale local fracking may have been performed at these wells, for example for wellbore cleaning, but no high volume hydraulic fracking (HVHF) had been used, with the exception of the Preese Hall-1 well drilled by Cuadrilla in Lancashire in 2011. The definition of HVHF is discussed below.

The topic received considerable public debate on environmental grounds, with a 2019 high court ruling ultimately banning the process. Only two horizontal wells were ever fracked using HVHF. The operator, Cuadrilla, was supposed to have started plugging and decommissioning these wells in 2022, but in spring 2025 it had not even started.