The question of shale-gas drilling in Quebec needs to be further studied, said a committee that spent the past six months looking into the industry.
The committee says the government should do a strategic environmental evaluation of shale-gas drilling. That’s the kind of long-term study that was done on oil and gas drilling in the lower St. Lawrence River, which led to a ban on drilling last fall. That type of study, overseen by an expert committee, can take one to two years to complete.
And during the time of that study, no hydraulic fracturing – where a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is injected into the ground at high-pressure – should be allowed, unless it is for the purposes of the study, said the four commissioners who did the study for the Bureau d’audiences publique sur l’environnement.
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