Reform mayor Andrea Jenkyns caught courting US oil baron

Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor for Lincolnshire, has corresponded with the head of an American oil and gas giant in the hopes of opening up the UK to fracking. The environmentally ruinous practice was effectively banned in Britain back in 2019 due to questions over its safety.

On 24 February, the Guardian reported that Jenkyns emailed US fracking firm Heyco Energy to ask how she:

could help with your recent gas find in my county.

In 2025, Heyco’s UK subsidiary – Egdon Resources – published a major gas discovery beneath Lincolnshire’s Gainsborough Trough. However, scientists have known of the wider gas field itself for over a decade.

Unfortunately for Jenkyns, she apparently forgot that the majority of the mayoral authority’s emails are a matter of public record. As such, a freedom of information request revealed her courtship of the American fracking giant.

‘Confidential’ (or not)

In spite of fracking’s well-known potential to cause earthquakes, Jenkyns is reportedly keen to frack her own county. Likewise, and in defiance of the de-facto UK ban on the practice, the Reform mayor has met with fracking companies at least four times in the last 8 months.

The Guardian reported that:

In a presentation marked “Confidential”, Heyco downplayed concerns about toxic chemicals found in fracking fluid. It also shared a list of rebuttals to key criticisms of fracking and its benefits over renewable forms of energy, which was tailored to the Gainsborough Trough project, the documents obtained by the Guardian show.

Jenkyns said she was “very supportive of fracking” in her message asking how she could help the company, sent to Egdon’s general inbox in June last year. The company’s CEO, Mark Abbott, responded 11 minutes later, offering to meet her to “discuss the potential for gas in Lincolnshire and the surrounding area”.

In a Facebook post on the same day as this meeting, Jenkyns championed the exploitation of the Gainsborough gas as a “no-brainer.”

After the meeting, Abbott emailed Jenkyns and other Greater Lincolnshire county officials. He confirmed that they discussed Gainsborough Trough’s shale gas, and methods for building public support for operations in the area.

Egdon Resources and George Yates

Abbott also mentioned the possibility of a US visit for Jenkyns, and offered to set up a meeting with Egdon Resources’ CEO, George Yates. Yates is a major supporter of the Republican Party, a Trump donor, and has links to the ‘climate-sceptic’ Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Inevitably, he’s also previously characterised the concept of net zero as pseudoscience. At the Lincolnshire Energy Conference in February 2025, Yates tried to blame soaring energy prices on the UK’s green energy initiatives. In reality, prices had ballooned due to a worldwide spike in the price of natural gas.

In October 2025, Jenkyns and several other officials met up with Yates. At that meeting, the CEO presented Egdon’s study of the:

potential positive impacts of shale gas development for Lincolnshire.

Jenkyns then held yet another meeting with Heyco itself in 2025.

Fracking – a Ponzi scheme

Jenkyns has positioned herself as an enemy of green energy projects in Lincolnshire. She’s previously lodged complaints about solar farms in the county, and described the concept of net zero as a “con”. This is deeply ironic, given the close resemblance of many US fracking firms to Ponzi schemes.

Back in 2018, the Financial Times investigated the capital generation of 48 major US frackers. It found that the firms are making virtually no real revenue whatsoever. Instead, the companies borrow massive amounts, and buy time by using more loans to pay off the interest on previous debt.

The same rationale would inevitably apply in the UK, as the Brighton Energy Cooperative reported:

1. Gas usage has fallen for years. EU gas demand is 10 percent less than it was in 2007. Indeed, the standard European price of gas is at half its 2013 level. It’s unlikely a gas shortage will manifest to life raft those ailing balance sheets. More and more (non UK) producers have gas on the market – which doesn’t augur well for domestic competitiveness.

2. Renewables are getting cheaper, with large-scale wind and solar 50-60% cheaper since 2013.

3. The UK can’t frack cheaply, since most reserves sit under population centres. Funnily enough, these centres are remarkably unwilling to submit to the various cowboy operations forced upon them and who demand they give up the integrity of their substrata. And all the various conflicts this throws up – legal cases, regulatory obstacles, planning enquiries, public enquiries, public relations men and women – are expensive. Sussex fracker UKOG, for example, maintains it spent £1m on evicting a protest camp two years ago, and that’s only the start of it.

That analysis was published in 2018 – however, the UK’s use of natural gas has only continued to plummet since then.

No comment

Jenkyns and Greater Lincolnshire council refused to offer comment on the Guardian’s exposé. However, Yates himself stated that:

I meet with people of many and varied views on all matters. I am a long-standing Republican supporter, always open and transparent with my political donations, as required by US law. We look to engage with policymakers and politicians of all persuasions to make the case for indigenous resources, which have clear security of supply, economic and environmental benefits compared to increasing reliance on imports.

Meanwhile, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit’s (ECIU) Alasdair Johnstone stated that:

The public continue to be sceptical about fracking, with polls showing support barely breaks 20%. The Conservatives when in Government learnt to their cost how contentious fracking is as an issue, bringing down a Prime Minister in the process. It is clear that other members of Reform are more wary of the issue, with Reform-led Lancashire and North Yorkshire councils both opposing fracking projects in their areas.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that Reform can barely even keep its own councillors in line, Jenkyns’ fracking dreams in Lincolnshire are a clear violation of public trust.

The people of the UK are opposed to fracking. Environmental science is opposed to fracking. Even basic economic analysis – that supposed guiding light of the right – is opposed to fracking. Jenkyns is engaged in a blatant cash-grab, and she’s willing to rob the very land of Lincolnshire to do it.

Featured image via the Canary