So if there are domestic supplies to be had, it plainly makes sense that these should be used in preference to reliance on potentially hostile, autocratic regimes in the Middle East and Russia.

So far, so logical. But here’s the problem. There is a world of a difference between the “in place” reserves, reckoned by the BGS to total between 822 and 1,329 trillion cubic feet in the Lancashire Bowland-Hodder units alone, and what might in practice be recoverable, likely according to the same report to be more than a hundred times smaller. 

This might still sound a lot, but just to put it in context, it would amount to no more than a third of the UK’s annual consumption over three years and would require hundreds of wells to be drilled to exploit it.

To be fair, the BGS report did admit to not knowing with any certainty. “Only with further shale gas exploration drilling and testing over an extended period, and optimisation of the extraction process, will it be possible to determine whether this identified shale gas prospectivity can be exploited commercially – and how significant a contribution it could make to the future UK energy mix,” it said.

But the omens were scarcely good. Despite this, some developers pushed ahead, encouraged by generous tax breaks announced in the 2013 Budget by the then chancellor, George Osborne. Promoters naturally concentrated on the massively bigger numbers for the gas-in-place, rather than likely yields, which realistically were always going to be much smaller.

Even Osborne, a fully signed up convert to the cause, was forced to admit that though he had high hopes for the number of jobs that fracking might create, the amounts of gas generated were likely to be too small to have any meaningful impact on international prices. Unfortunately, it is the latter that dictate what UK households have to pay.

It’s true that in the land of boundless fracking – the US – gas prices are not nearly as high as they are internationally, but that’s because the US is a net exporter of natural gas. As it is, frackers are diverting as much supply as they physically can to LNG facilities, so as to take advantage of much higher international prices, but essentially, their output is landlocked and therefore commands a lower price.

The Government could, I suppose, legislate to require that all UK produced gas is domestically sold, or do the same as France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has forced the state-controlled EDF to sell its energy at a lower price. But no one would invest if there was even the remotest whiff of that.

In any case, in none of the three fields studied in the UK for their fracking potential was there sufficient gas to justify further prospecting. Cuadrilla’s wells produced no burnable quantity of gas at all. In the end, it was the supposed risk of earthquakes that prompted the Government to ban fracking, but even if there was no such risk, it seems doubtful that UK fracking could ever be commercially viable. 

It is also bedevilled by all manner of planning constraints. In the US, it is landholders that own the mineral rights, and they therefore have a natural incentive to exploit them. In the UK, it is the crown. A mutually acceptable way of sharing profits between landowner, developer and the Crown was never found.

Ironically, today’s very high gas prices might just about make UK fracking a commercially worthwhile endeavour. But even if the moratorium was lifted tomorrow, it would be six years or more before you’d see much of a yield, and by then it seems likely the current squeeze will be over, and lower prices will once more rule the roost.

The sheer number of wells that have to be drilled, and the infrastructure that needs to be put in place to make these reservoirs viable would, moreover, always run into extreme levels of local opposition.

It’s remarkable that fracking has suddenly been popped up again as a potential form of energy salvation, because all these issues were well aired before the curtain came down three years ago. 

Let’s by all means go all out to generate as much domestic supply as we can, but this is much more likely to be found, and in more socially acceptable, commercially viable form, in further development of our traditional offshore North Sea reserves than by reducing our fields, hills and valleys to an industrial wasteland.