I can understand peoples awareness about fracking but these feelings were held about North Sea oil and gas drilling as well.

Some said it would pollute the sea and kill off fish stocks.

It never happened. I worked on the rigs for four years and like any industry there were accidents but I never saw pollution that would kill off fish stocks.

At present we are running out of natural resources. We are indebted to Russia for gas and soon the Chinese for atomic power.

We cannot control the prices and could easily be held to political ransom.

We are sitting on a fortune of power. Do we sit like Luddites and keep saying no or do we try and find a safe way to extract shale gas?

If we do not try we’ll never know. Wind power could never supply all of the power we need.

If power runs out and we get power cuts and our units of power cost an astronomical price, who will stand up and say: “We should have got the gas at the first opportunity”.

Personally, being on an island, I wish we could do more research to tide and wave power, but in the meantime take the shale gas until the problems of sea power have been solved.

Mr Rosca, Station Road, Hailsham