I AM unsure what the vociferous fracking protesters do fear. Some years ago I was privileged to visit an industrial site in Rugeley in Staffordshire. Here there was a whole underground industry; a lime quarry a coal mine and a power plant to convert the limestone into array of products like cement and breeze blocks.

On the surface there was virtually no sign of what went on underneath, apart from a spout, from which came the products, almost like magic.

With fracking I can see a plethora of opportunity for underground works. I can imagine a grid for electric vehicles entirely powered by strategically placed frack sites. I can see industry sitting right on top of frackers, limiting all forms of pollution that are caused by transport. Only once those exploited energies have been fixed into product do they leave the site, safely.

However the fracking industry is bedevilled by complaints which, to my mind, flow in precisely the wrong direction.

Lesson one: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Lesson two: there may be more than one way to lose a race. Future wars will be resource based. The current highly controversial fracking sites are having to work under very narrow stricture, which is good.

What is not good is if we destroy a potentially useful technology before it has even begun.

The only sensible way to do the required research is to allow a limited number of such sites across a range of circumstances to test the true cost/benefit of this new technology. The current sites were only meant for research.

Peter Jewell, via email