Debates on whether taking gas from the island’s seabed would involve ’fracking’ are a distraction from the real issue, according to the Manx Labour Party (MLP).

Green issues co-ordinator Joney Faragher says regardless of the technique used, government should not be pursuing projects in the fossil fuel industry, given the climate emergency.

It comes after local company Crogga, which is surveying a find 8-10 miles off Maughold Head, denied that ’fracking’ would be used to produce gas reserves.

It’s a statement echoed by Chief Minister Howard Quayle, who says there is ’no will, permission or intent in place from Tynwald to pursue fracking’.

In a statement released by her party, Mrs Faragher says attention should be focused on harnessing the island’s ’abundant renewable energy sources’.

She said: ’Extraction distraction is making fools of us all. The issue is about the extraction of fossil gas, it’s not about the method of extraction.’

She said if hydraulic fracturing was used, this would ’concern her greatly’ but, in the first instance, pursuing the fossil fuel extraction industry is ’not what we want to be doing in the situation we’re in right now’.

’That’s my issue. Having just declared a climate emergency and the situation the world is in, we don’t want to be another country, another generation, that knows about the science but refuses to act on it,’ she said.

Proposals do not include fracking of shale deposits which tend to be deeper and less easy to fracture than the Collyhurst sandstone found off the island’s north east coast.

The offshore hydraulic fracturing used will be similar to that safely employed in the North Sea for more than 20 years to stimulate wells.