An interview with Andrew Hindle, CEO at Infrastrata

Jason Haiselden and I interviewed Andrew Hindle, CEO at Infrastrata, at the demo/presentation yesterday. He would not let us film.

Here are the bullet points, more details to come later..

• Infrastrata have made a new interpretation of test drillings carried out by BP in the 1980’s and they wish to explore to see if they can find resources that BP did not. (Why would they be better at assessing this now? What resources have they invested?)
• Andrew admitted that the illustrations at their exhibition were not at all an accurate image of reality and that they can only make assumptions as to what resources are out there. He refered to the document by Ian West and when I said I could not make sense of that, he had nothing to add.
• (Clearly, if they plan to frack they do not need to care so much what is out there since fracking does not require a pocket of oil or gas, just a lot of shale rock which is the most common substance in any area and lots of it here. So this could be why they base their investment on old and superficial theoretical investigations.)
• Andrew Hindle has 30 years experience working for Texaco, but he did not present any particular experience about the science of exploration for natural resources or geology. He said he left the practical issues to his drill master. (What we have seen from ‘drill masters’ so far is a professional driller with no concern for the environment.)
• Andrew says he doesn’t know anything about fracking. (If he is so experienced, how can he not?)
• The pipeline will be just like a water pipe just a little thicker. The gas would be lead directly into the Swanage grid. (Is that all? We tried hard to get him to explain the rest of the process of bringing the oil / gas to the consumers. If there is so much out there, surely Swanage and surroundings cannot be the only ones taking the gas? Surely that would not cover Infrastratas expenses. We asked what would happen if we did not consume the gas? The answer was that it could be lead back. We said that was not possible and the answer was they had found a way of doing that. As Andrew admitted he does not know what they will find, how come he starts to explain the simplest possible solution as a likely outcome?)
• There are no plans beyond exploratory drilling. (In any other business you would not get funding, if you did not know all the stages in your business plan. Another hint that they might just rely on being a holding company and hand the project over to the fracking companies which the government push even harder now to encourage.)
• This rig site will be the same as other gas sites in Purbeck. (Again how can he inform this to the public, when he admits to us that he does not know what they will find?)
• Andrew admits that their statements promising not to frack in the press and in their printed material does not bind them, or anybody else who take over, legally. He says they are a public company and cannot lie to people. (Well they are a holding company from 2008 with no track record.)
• Andrew says that the landowners agreement is legally binding any company to not frack in the area. However, we can not get to see that document. (Can the landowner’s agreement be changed later on? A legal firm should be allowed to study the documents that we can’t see, on our behalf and sign a statement that we are really guaranteed to not ever have fracking here.)
• Andrew knows that the road belongs to Swanage TC. He doesn’t know why the STC didn’t comment on the application.
• Andrew admits that if oil were found then a pipeline would have to be run along the jurassic heritage site.
• Andrew admits that Infrastrata had ‘asked’ that an ERA (Environmental Risk Assessment) need not be carried out.

(They are clearly an empty shell aspiring to become a Trojan horse for something we can not know what will be. Police and private security personel are preventing residents from protesting all over UK. If we let this begin, there is no way of knowing how it will proceed.)

Elizabeth Thomsen