Task Force wants to get cracking on fracking whether we like it or not

Fracking is back. The industry funded Shale Gas Task Force says the UK should start constructing exploratory wells now. Just to assess how much oil and gas might be made available through the process, you see. So we’d know just how much milk and honey could pour into the UK economy as a result.

The benefits claimed include jobs (perhaps lots of them), improvements to the UK’s abysmal trade balance, not to mention security of energy supply. But the poor dears at the Task Force complain they can’t possibly be expected to come up with realistic estimates for these until we know how much gas is there. So it’s been forced to rely on “intelligent guesswork”.

It would surprise you to learn that it’s guessing there will be a formidable fracking windfall for UK plc.

The report has actually been quite careful in places. It has hedged it bets when it comes to the potential impact on energy prices, for example. This, it says, will be limited. In part that is because the cheap energy boom fracking has generated in America has largely been fuelled by legal restrictions that prohibit producers from tapping into the export market.

Any attempt by the UK to impose similar strictures would likely be ruled illegal. So consumers will be stuck with paying market rates even if the upper estimates of how much UK gas could be fracked are realised (and they probably won’t be).

A cynic might see an ulterior motive in the Task Force in making this point: it does rather help with its claim to independence from the industry that pays its way. Look, see, we’re not making any outlandish claims here.

There might also be an ulterior motive in the Task Force urging the Government to get things started. Once those exploratory wells are producing, the genie will be out of the bottle. Fracking will be with us, and in the absence of any disasters, it may prove tough to put the cork back in.

There remains formidable challenges to overcome before the process becomes widespread, not least the objections of local communities who fear the impact on local environments and especially local house price environments.

Money could oil those wheels, but no one can quite decide how “community benefits” from fracking should be made available. It wasn’t a problem in the US, where locals receive royalty payments, but US landowners owns their oil and gas rights whereas in the UK it is the crown.

But if the Task Force’s exploratory wells are in the ground, and producing, that becomes a mere detail, rather than a block on more being created.

Fracking, halted in 2011 after it was blamed for earth tremors in Lancashire, will be with us again whether we like it or not. Those in on the ground floor of the nascent industry are counting on that. So is their tame Task Force.

They’re already calling it “the Mog Effect”. Forget the brouhaha over John Lewis’s man in the moon ad (and Aldi’s clever knock off). Sainsbury’s Christmas campaign featuring the wildly popular children’s character looks to have been the big winner in the run up to the festive season, if the latest figures from researcher Kantar are to be believed.

There was, of course, a tie in book and toy (with all the profits going to charity) that proved to be catnip to parents. But the biggest beneficiary was still Sainsbury’s. Not that it needed Mog. Its market beating performance started before the feline’s festive adventures began. Mog just added some icing to an already tasty sales cake.

That won’t make for a happy Christmas for those who have made the stock one of the most popular shorts on the FTSE 100. Investors looking to go long by tucking some Sainsbury’s in their stockings were in the majority on the back of the Kantar figures.

There’s been a perception it is among the more vulnerable of the UK supermarkets. It’s hardly finding life easy but Sainsbury’s continues to prove the doubters wrong as Tesco flounders. The latter’s mini-revival under Dave Lewis seems to have faded away.

Despite this, the market appeared willing to forgive the gloomy outlook Kantar has foreshadowed. How long can the favourable impression created by Mr Lewis outlast a dismal reality? We might be about to find out because it is rather hard to see much light at the end of Tesco’s tunnel.

You couldn’t make this up. Imperial Tobacco is to change its name to Imperial Brands. In a statement to Reuters it said the new corporate title “better reflects the dynamic, brand-focused business that we are now”.

It is a case of life imitating fiction because that is almost exactly what John Grisham’s fictional Pynex Incorporated had done in his 2003 legal thriller The Runaway Jury in an attempt to divert attention from the tobacco core of its business. That name change didn’t stop Pynex from ending up as the victim of the fictional jury, which was ruling on a case brought by a smoker’s widow.

The novel was written before those sort of judgments had become a fact of life for the industry. But is Imperial’s lead one that others could follow? Volkswagen, that has also had trouble with emissions that can do nasty things to human health, could perhaps change its name to Volks Brands.

Royal Bank of Scotland, meanwhile, has inflicted considerable damage to the nation’s financial health. So maybe it could try Royal Brands of Scotland. It’s got a certain ring to it.