Apr. 3 (Bloomberg) -- An icy rain is pelting about 30 protesters who’ve converged at the gate of a natural gas drilling site near Manchester, England. On the other side of a fence topped with razor wire, a 10-story-high rig is boring into shale to determine if it’s suitable for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The demonstrators unfurl a banner: “Fracking will poison our children.”

As a phalanx of police officers pushes the protesters back, a convoy of supply trucks inches out of the gate and past an encampment of tents and trailers sporting placards decrying the drilling practice, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its May issue. “Fracking will not lower gas prices, Lord Browne,” one reads on this January morning.

The following week, the man the protesters call “the fracking czar” is seated in a solarium-like conference room overlooking the rooftops of Mayfair in central London. John Browne, a former chief executive officer of oil giant BP Plc, is clad in a crisp, white dress shirt, enameled cuff links, a royal-blue necktie and dark trousers.

Browne, an independent member of the House of Lords and a nonexecutive director in the U.K. government’s Cabinet Office, is lamenting how the protests may slow his efforts to bring America’s shale boom to Britain.

Browne says fracking would secure a new domestic energy source, create thousands of jobs, generate billions of pounds in tax revenue and be a far cheaper alternative than constructing nuclear plants.

David Fuller's view

Here is the full article.

This is one of the best and most balanced articles on fracking that I have seen.  It is a long article so if you are pressed for time, I suggest that you just read the concluding paragraphs.