Ineos, the $50bn petrochemicals giant controlled by British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, aims to accelerate shale gas development in the UK by lodging as many as 30 planning applications to drill test wells in the next six months.
Tom Crotty, a director at Ineos, said the company hoped to start drilling in the north of England early next year and could begin extracting gas in about 18 months through the controversial technique known as fracking.
The move comes as the group this year ends a six-year tax exile with the opening of a new headquarters in London for its mainly UK-based upstream oil and gas businesses.
Mr Ratcliffe, the UK founder of Ineos who took the company to Switzerland in 2010 when it was struggling to pay taxes in the wake of the global financial crisis, has also returned to live in the UK, as first reported by the Sunday Times.
Mr Crotty said the decision to headquarter the upstream businesses in the UK predated Britain’s vote last month to leave the EU. Mr Ratcliffe, who has argued that Britain would thrive outside of the EU, had decided to return given the rapidly growing business in the UK, he said.
The main concern for Ineos now was to maintain free trade with the EU as in Norway, where Ineos had a sizeable petrochemical business. “As a model that works for us,” he said.
Ineos, which has been built up over more than a decade through a series of acquisitions, last year moved into gas production after acquiring 12 North Sea fields from Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman for $750m.
The group, which owns the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland, has ambitions to become a substantial oil and gas producer, particularly in shale gas. Ineos has backed a highly public campaign to convince the Scottish government to lift its moratorium on fracking over the past year.
However, the failure of the campaign has encouraged the group to bid for licences in England. It now has rights covering some 1m acres, mainly in the Cheshire basin, the north Midlands and North Yorkshire.
Mr Crotty said that he was confident that recent changes to rules allowing ministers to intervene if local councils delay granting permission would finally lead to Ineos drilling test wells.
Once drilling started, Mr Crotty said, people would “see [fracking] is not the Frankenstein monster they thought it was”. However he admitted that until permission was granted, it would continue to be “difficult” to convince critics.
In May, councillors in Yorkshire approved the UK’s first fracking project in five years for a company called Third Energy. The technique, which forces a combination of water, sand and chemicals into the ground at high pressure to break rock and release gas, has come under fire from environmental campaigners who claim it has led to earthquakes and contamination of the water table.
