LAST week, the Government approved an application for Cuadrilla to drill for shale gas in Lancashire.

A second application has been deferred pending further research.

Naturally, the anti-s have been complaining about the Government overturning a decision by a democratically elected council to prevent this development – although the same people will presumably applaud the Government if it overturns the decision by a democratically elected council in north Yorkshire to allow drilling!

I'm pleased that drilling is now going to take place on a commercial basis and it will be interesting to monitor developments.

There have been a great deal of allegations made about what shale gas will and will not mean – so it will be interesting to see who was right.

In the USA, the coal industry is panicking about the increase in shale gas which has seen natural gas prices fall by almost a third.

In 2008, over 50 per cent of American power came from coal – by 2014 that had fallen to 39 per cent, with the Energy Information Administration expecting coal's share to be overtaken by that of natural gas before the end of 2016.

Several major coal producers went bankrupt earlier this year.

Such has been the pace and scale of the shale revolution that liquefied natural gas terminals, originally built so that the US could import the gas it needed, are being rapidly converted to allow US-produced gas to be exported to other countries.

I'm not guaranteeing that the UK experience will be as fruitful as that of the USA – there are many reasons, geological, regulatory and market-wise, which will make the experience different.

However, we simply won't know how well shale gas will work until we start trying to get the stuff out of the ground.

The new site will be one of the most heavily regulated sites in the UK, with a whole cornucopia of organisations monitoring seismic activity, water purity, emissions and many more variables.

Many people don't know that unconventional drilling is already taking place in Warrington and has been for six years.

To date I've not received a single complaint about it. Let's hope the new site is an equally good neighbour.