This is a call to be ready, and intellectually armed, for the arrival on our shores of yet more environmentally exploitative practices pioneered in the US. Remember, when they sneeze, we catch a cold almost instantly.

It concerns, as discussed in a separate post, the long and close relationship between Big Tobacco and Big Oil. In early December last year Hcigs, an e-cigarette company based in Montana, approached H-gas, a shale gas drilling concern also based in Montana, to help it develop methane fuelled fuel-cell batteries for its ever more power-hungry, and ever-more cumbersome devices. Daft enough as this seems, what happened next is even dafter: failing – obviously – to produce a sufficiently reliable and safe fuel-cell device they began work instead on exporting the technology of e-cigarettes to the process of fracking.

The appalling result is ‘frapping’: blasting super-pressure propylene glycol vapour (i.e. what comes out of e-cigarettes) down into shale rock so it can bond with methane, liquify into a propylene glycol methane gel and be sucked up to allow harvesting of the desperately sought after gas. With initial test-drilling results in much is being made of the supposedly safer, cleaner credentials of the new technique.

But it is not safer. Having obtained a copy of the results US activist Peter Berg reveals:

• methane leakages into domestic water supply a thousand times smaller than with normal fracking but still significant enough to cause a small – invisible – fire risk in sinks
• the possibility of cows and other animals close to wells becoming chemically dependent on methane particulates
• earth tremors a thousand times less powerful than from normal fracking but still noticeable enough for people to ask ‘did you feel that?’ 

Invisible to the naked eye, but still there: microscopic bursts of ignited methane

Captured in an instant: (men) visibly concerned about earth tremors

So, ready for the fight? You better be. Get your wellies, grab your coat, don your waterproofs, and get over to here to start co-ordinating.