Prime Minister Liz Truss has announced the ban on fracking will be lifted as part of plans to accelerate the UK’s domestic energy supply.
Ms Truss said lifting the moratorium, brought in by the Conservatives, will enable developers to seek planning permission for fracking and get gas flowing in as soon as six months.
Ms Truss said she was “setting a new ambition for our country”.
“Far from being dependent on the global energy market and the actions of malign actors, we will make sure that the UK is a net energy exporter by 2040,” she said.
Fracking is a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock by drilling into the earth.
Item was banned in England in 2019 after new research raised fresh fears about the risk of earthquakes.
The Conservative’s manifesto said the party would not support fracking “unless the science shows categorically that it can be done safely”.
And in March, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng argued that those calling for its return “misunderstand the situation we find ourselves in”.
The then-business secretary said that it would take a decade to extract sufficient volumes and would have a negative impact on communities while failing to lower energy bills.
He wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “With the best will in the world, private companies are not going to sell the shale gas they produce to UK consumers below the market price. They are not charities, after all.”
Ed Miliband, the former Labor leader and shadow climate minister, said lifting the moratorium was “another case of ideology trumping common sense”.
Earlier on Thursday he told Sky News: “There’s only one way out of being in the grip of the geopolitics of Putin and others and that is a clean energy sprint.
“I’m afraid the government seems to be setting its face against that.”
