Reform UK has vowed to lift the ban on fracking if it wins power.
Deputy leader Richard Tice said it would be ‘grossly financially negligent’ to leave ‘hundreds of billions of pounds’ worth of energy buried underground.
The party has already told oil and gas firms to prepare to make fresh applications for licences – and to get ready to ‘drill, baby, drill’ – four years before the next general election is expected.
It comes despite Labour ordering the last wells in England to be filled with cement this year as it vows to ‘ban fracking for good’.
Mr Tice said: ‘We’ve got potentially hundreds of billions of energy treasure in the form of shale gas.
‘It’s grossly financially negligent to a criminal degree to leave that value underground and not to extract it.’
Fracking, a method used to extract gas or oil from shale rock, took place in England for decades on a small scale but its expansion in the 2010s led to protests, legal challenges and fears that it was causing earthquakes.
David Cameron’s Conservative government promised a ‘shale gas revolution’, similar to the boom then under way in the US, but fracking was banned by Boris Johnson’s administration in 2019 after tremors at a site in Lancashire.
Richard Tice (pictured) said it would be ‘grossly financially negligent’ to leave ‘hundreds of billions of pounds’ worth of energy buried underground
File photo dated of a worker at the Cuadrilla fracking site in Little Plumpton, Lancashire
The ban was temporarily lifted by Liz Truss but a rebellion by Tory MPs contributed to her downfall, and her successor Rishi Sunak reinstated the block on further drilling.
Labour’s manifesto pledged to ban fracking for good and earlier this year Energy Secretary Ed Miliband approved plans to fill in the last remaining wells in Lancashire.
Yet a new field of natural gas has recently been discovered under Lincolnshire, which one energy company claims could supply the country’s energy needs for seven years and add billions to the economy.
A Reform UK government would lift the ban immediately and then work with companies to look for gas at independently monitored sites.
‘That will confirm the quantity of gas available and satisfy people that it’s safe,’ Mr Tice told the BBC.
He said Reform would ‘create an attractive regulatory and tax framework’ rather than putting public money into fracking.
He and party leader Nigel Farage held a meeting with energy firms in Aberdeen in recent months and told them to prepare for fresh drilling.
‘Keep us in mind, and in the run up to the next general election, you should be getting your ducks in a row and getting applications ready,’ Mr Tice told them.
Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire mayor Dame Andrea Jenkyns has also met the firm that wants to frack the gas field in Gainsborough.
But energy minister Miatta Fahnbulleh said: ‘We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean-energy superpower to protect current and future generations.
‘The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil-fuel markets, and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect consumers from spiralling energy costs.’