At United Downs, a stone’s throw from many of the old mines, a pioneering project run by Geothermal Engineering is drawing heat from granite rocks that lie more than three miles below the surface.

It does this by pumping out water warmed to 200 degrees celsius to power a heat exchanger, before being pumped back down again to a shallower well.

It’s a known technology, it works, it is at least possible for it to be economic, so why not?

Well, of course, this being Britain we do have a problem:

However, the UK currently lacks a specific regulatory regime for geothermal, according to a House of Commons Library report,

That’s one of those things that is terribly easy to provide. Just print the fracking regs with “geothermal” copy pasted in where necessary. The similarity - drilling holes which might cause earthquakes, more importantly the reinjection of wastewater which causes earthquakes - is obvious enough that they can and should be both governed by the same rules.

So, what’s to stop us? Except the clear point that if geothermal were to be restricted by the same rules as fracking then geothermal would not be possible. Therefore geothermal will gain different rules - and the hypocrisy of the fracking rules will be revealed. Not that they’ve exactly been hidden, but made even more clear perhaps.

Nothing like the clear rule of law, is there, and this is nothing like it.