UK shale gas survey likely to reveal reserves higher than expected

New estimates of the UK’s reserves of shale gas will be published on Thursday, and are expected to be much larger than originally thought – potentially supplying the UK with decades’ worth of natural gas, if a high proportion of the gas in the rocks can be extracted at a low cost. However that key question that cannot yet be answered due to the lack of experimental wells drilled so far and the challenges posed by the UK’s high density of population.