Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 28/03/2013
Event: Philip O'Quigley on fracking: "The chemicals we use, you'll find them under your kitchen sink"
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
Tanya Beckett: Well, we've been hearing about a number of small and medium-size businesses listing their shares - or floating, as we call it, of course - on the London Stock Exchange. Now this means that these shares can trade easily - that's the point, it's an exchange. So it seems appropriate, on a day that we've been hearing about an exercise of drilling off Britain's coast, to hear from an oil and gas company, which started trading for the first time in London just not long ago - today. A BP-led consortium of companies, as I've mentioned, have already started on the first of five wells planned over the next two years at Clair, west of Shetland. And this is the latest in a series of announcements aimed at transforming the Atlantic's role as an oil-producing region. Well, Falcon Oil & Gas do their drilling in places much further afield - South Africa and Australia and Hungary - and they're listing already. They're listed on Toronto Stock Exchange. So the question is: why do they want to list in London? Well, Falcon's CEO, Philip O'Quigley, joins me now from the London Stock Exchange. Philip, why list in London?
Philip O'Quigley: Good morning, Tanya. I guess the main reason is proximity, and proximity in - we are, as you say, we're very international, in Australia, South Africa and Hungary but we are headquartered in Dublin - so we have that proximity to market. But also the proximity to my most recent involvement in the resource sector, as the Tony Reilly-led company Providence Resources. I'm still on the board of that company, but I've been with that company for five years, and the success that company has enjoyed here on the AIM market, and my chairman John Craven's most recent success here when he took Cove Energy and sold that company for 2.4 billion - again, another huge success for the AIM market.
Tanya Beckett: And you know it's a very capital-intensive business, so frankly it's good to list wherever you can, right? And get access to as many investors as possible.
Philip O'Quigley: Well yes, but I mean, you know the London market's a very sophisticated market. It's a very well-educated market, it knows the resource sector extremely well and it has huge capital resources. So it is - it's an obvious market to come to, for the resource sector.
Tanya Beckett: Now you have a reputation for being experts in this fracking business, extracting gas from shale deposits. It's controversial, isn't it? But you're very much from a highly technical background, your company.
Philip O'Quigley: Yeah, it is controversial, and everywhere you go it's controversial. It's controversial in Ireland, it's controversial in Europe, it's less controversial in Australia, it is controversial in South Africa. But, you know, there's a lot of myths out there about fracking. And a lot of those myths need to get, kind of, clearly understood as [sic] what they are. And people talk about, you know, water usage and how much water is used - yes, we use a lot of water, but you have to contextualise the quantity of water we use. You drill a well, it's going to last for ten years, the amount of water you use to frack that would be the same amount of water used, for example, to irrigate a golf course for one month.
Tanya Beckett: Yeah, to be fair, some of the concerns are much longer-term than that, and perhaps not yet felt. For example, the chemicals that you use, and the seismic activity that might be stimulated as a result of doing it.
Philip O'Quigley: Well, in terms of chemicals, you know, 99.85% of what we use in fracking is water and sand. The chemicals we use, you'll find them under your kitchen sink, and they're in minute quantities. In terms of -
Tanya Beckett: Probably not my kitchen sink, but that's a reflection of my standards of hygiene.
Philip O'Quigley [laughs]: In terms of, you know, you've got the "Cuadrilla earthquake", as they call it, I mean - and seismologists measure earthquakes, you know, I think that was the measurement taken here of something of the order of 2 or 2.4. If you have a seismologist, he can't discern between an earthquake - a 2.4 - and passing traffic.
Tanya Beckett: Okay. Philip, there we must leave it, thank you very much indeed.