EPCG helps the British economy - black gold
Taken from the Petersfield Post Wednesday 28th December (part of a longer article).
"Welling up: black gold looks to be top quality"
"Thick black oil pours into a bucket - giving hope there may be a fortune hiding beneath the South Downs.
Engineers from Northern Petroleum have been testing for oil in the heart of the South Downs National Park since September.
And so far the results have been staggering.
The oil coming up from more than 4,000ft beneath the site is virtually undiluted.
It is so pure that Northern Petroleum boss Derek Musgrove believes the site may be commercially viable if the tests continue to be fruitful.
He believes that anything up to five million barrels of crude oil - worth more than £300 million - may be beneath the ground at the site.
Mr Musgrove, managing director of Northern Petroleum, said : 'We have been pumping oil that is virtually water free'.
Extracting oil in the South Downs has been criticised by green groups, but Mr Musgrove Stressed that environmental impact has been kept to a minimum.
Mr Musgrove said 'If you produce a 100 barrels of oil a day, you are saving 10,000 dollars of imports. The British economy need this kind of industry'." The Environmental Project Consulting Group has been instrumental in ensuring that impact on surrounding habitats and wildlife has been kept to a minimum. The site is completely hidden from view, set in a small part of a private woodland, is low noise and low impact.
In order to prepare an Ecological Impact Statement that contributed to the success of the planning application we:
- investigated the background to the site by desk study;
- walked the site to determine any significant potential ecological interest;
- undertook detailed studies of flowering plants, trees, bats, badgers and reptiles.
On the basis of these studies we identified that the woodland on the proposed exploration site had been previously degraded by felling and replanting which had considerably reduced its ecological interest.
We also prepared a scheme whereby adverse impact on any remaining ecological interest was avoided, mitigated or compensated for such as by:
- moving the drilling site away from badger setts;
- collecting and transferring protected reptiles occurring on the access route to a nearby safe location; and by
- ensuring that tree removal was undertaken outside of the bird nesting season.
We also developed a scheme of soil handling to ensure that soils were not damaged, and a scheme of woodland habitat restoration providing an improvement on the degraded woodland to be lost.
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