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‘Britain discovers 100bn barrels of oil in W Sussex’

Thursday, 09 April 2015 6:22 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 09 April 2015 6:22 PM ]

A massive oilfield with approximately 100 billion barrels of crude has been discovered in southern England near Gatwick Airport in West Sussex, reports say.

UK Oil & Gas Investments made the discovery and are predicting the oil amounts to 158 million barrels per square mile.

They believe the new find will “comprehensively change the understanding of the area's potential oil resources" and that “based on what we've found here, we're looking at between 50 and 100 billion barrels of oil in place in the ground."

Analysts are predicting that only 3-15% of the oil may be usable.

The chairman of UK Oil & Gas, David Lenigas, is hopeful that large quantities of gas may be extracted beneath the black gold.

He said that he and his team “are now looking forward to drilling the Triassic, which is a new and untested exploration target in the area, which, if successful, may contain appreciable volumes of gas.”

However, counteracting this glee of Lenigas and his partners, environmental campaigners have chained themselves near the site, protesting against what they believe will be the inevitable use of fracking in extracting this gas. The controversial method involves pumping water, chemicals and sand against rocks at high pressure to release the natural resources that lie within.

Now London-based Professor of Economics Rodney Shakespeare says: “The question then becomes is, we have a major discovery, do we just treat it as a normal discovery? Well, the problem with our existing economics is that all productive capacity ends up in the hands of narrow groups.”

Professor Shakespeare told Press TV’s UK Desk on Thursday that “because of the technological shift, most people, that means most jobs which are coming into existence at the moment, are no longer sufficiently productive. Because, you see, it’s the capital instrument of which this is an example.”

The latest discovery is said to have the potential to counterweight the North Sea oil juggernaut, providing a boost to the local economy and indeed the economy of Britain as a whole.

The south of England already has oil productions in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, all lying within the Weald region. Experts are predicting, based on this discovery and the current oil productions, that Weald may provide Britain with around 10-30% of its future oil demands.

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