Nigel Farage’s Reform UK would allow a fossil fuel company owned by a Donald Trump donor to open up a huge fracking site in Greater Lincolnshire, DeSmog can reveal.

Andrea Jenkyns, Reform’s mayor in the region, recently met with Egdon Resources – an oil and gas firm owned by Texas-based Heyco Energy – which claims it has discovered huge deposits of natural gas in the Gainsborough Trough basin.

Jenkyns has said a Reform government would allow companies to extract the gas via fracking, pledging to echo Donald Trump’s U.S. administration by allowing major polluters to “drill baby drill”. Egdon, INEOS, and Island Gas (iGas) currently hold licences to drill the area.

George Yates, who owns Egdon and Heyco, has donated more than $130,000 to Trump and his allies since the beginning of 2019 according to DeSmog’s analysis.

“Reform’s pledge to hand out fracking licences to a Trump donor’s company shows exactly whose interests they serve – and it’s certainly not ordinary people. Fracking is dangerous, unpopular and has next to no chance of improving our energy security or bringing down bills,” said, Tessa Khan, executive director at the research and campaign group Uplift.

Jenkyns recently said that “Donald [Trump] is wise… We value our oil and gas industries and know that they are essential for Britain’s energy security and to fuel our homes.”

Farage and Trump are close allies. The Reform leader has campaigned for Trump during the past three presidential races, while the president has called Farage “a great guy”.

As revealed by DeSmog and The Mirror, Farage is set to skip the return of Parliament next week to speak alongside the president’s allies at an event in Washington DC.

Both Farage and Trump have received significant sums towards their campaigns from polluters. Fossil fuel interests poured $96 million into Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign and affiliated political campaigns, while Reform received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from polluting sources and climate science deniers.

Farage has also echoed Trump’s opposition to climate action. The Reform leader has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant. Trump has called climate change a “giant hoax” and has falsely suggested that rising sea levels will open up more waterfront property.

Fracking – which involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground at extreme pressure to extract oil and gas trapped in shale rock – has been banned in the UK since 2019 when it was briefly legalised by Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Fracking is environmentally controversial due to its triggering of earth tremors, and the vast amount of water that it uses. The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee – a body of MPs that advises the government on climate matters – concluded in 2019 that fracking was incompatible with the UK’s climate goals.

Farage’s deputy Richard Tice recently repeated the party’s commitment to fracking, claiming it is “grossly financially negligent” not to extract the UK’s shale gas reserves. In reality, energy experts have warned that extracting the gas via fracking is not cost effective in the UK.

Michael Bradshaw, a professor of global energy at the Warwick Business School, told the BBC: “The work carried out by the geologists in our research programme suggested that the complex geology of the shale basins in the UK” makes it “difficult” and “costly” to extract.

“The British public elected a government that pledged to make the UK a clean energy superpower with a landslide, so by prioritising their mates’ interests over the public’s, Reform is showing just how out of touch it is,” said Tessa Khan of Uplift.

“Communities across the UK should be building and benefiting from the industries of the future – not trying to revive a hopelessly unpopular industry that will enrich Trump donors and make the climate crisis even worse.”

Yates and MAGA

Yates is a long-standing Republican donor who has given money to Trump’s last two presidential campaigns.

In recent years, Yates has also given to high-profile figures closely associated with Trump’s project, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has also called climate change a “hoax”.

Yates has previously denied basic climate science. Quoted in November 2022, he claimed that net zero is a pseudo-scientific approach to reducing emissions. “We have to recognise our place in geologic time,” he said.

“We are in an interglacial period, which gets warmer,” he claimed. “there are at least 16 different variables that go into climate, and we have focused on one, without knowing their relative weightings. It is the one variable with the connection to man’s burning of fossil fuels.”

These claims are contradicted by the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts. Climate scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

However, Yates’s climate views conform to those of Reform’s leaders. Last month, Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Jenkyns said in an interview with Times Radio: “Do I believe that climate change exists? No.”

In February, Richard Tice told Sky News: “There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change the climate. Given that it’s gone on for millions of years, it will go on for millions of years.”

However, Jenkyns and all of Reform’s MPs represent areas exposed to the worst effects of extreme heat. 

YouGov’s public opinion tracker suggests only 24 percent of people in the UK want to restart fracking.

Greenpeace UK’s head of politics, Ami McCarthy, said: “Reform UK is a political party littered with climate deniers… They sing from the same hymn sheet as Trump, so it should be no surprise to anyone that Nigel Farage is willing to dish out fracking licences to a MAGA donor. 

“When it comes to fracking though, the UK and America are very different places. Fracking won’t lower bills, or provide any usable gas for many years. People don’t want the heavy traffic, noise and air pollution and even the risk of water pollution from small earthquakes caused by fracking anywhere near their homes. And they certainly don’t want all this trouble to boost the profits of companies owned by donors of the hard right. 

“The vehement opposition fracking faced when it last failed to get off the ground hasn’t gone away and this plan could well backfire on Farage, when the voters he is attempting to woo realise they might well end up with an industrial fracking pad in their local field.”

The current Labour government is staunchly opposed to fracking and has stated that “the biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets”.

Reform, Egdon, and Heyco were approached for comment.