Planners at a council in northern England have recommended rejecting applications for shale drilling at a meeting next week, dealing another blow to government efforts to kickstart the nascent industry, Bloomberg said Jan. 21.

Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. has applied for permission to drill at two sites in Lancashire, where the Bowland Basin is thought to hold as much as 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas, enough to meet demand in the U.K. for about 50 years. One of those permits was granted by the Environment Agency last week.

The U.K.’s Conservative Party-led government has opened up swathes of rural Britain to bidding and is offering tax breaks to drillers in a push to emulate the shale boom in the U.S. as oil and gas reserves in the North Sea dry up. The opposition Labour party says baseline monitoring needs to be carried out for a year before any drilling activity.

The shale-drilling technique is opposed by locals who are concerned about water contamination, increasing traffic and noise, and the industrialization of the British countryside.

“It has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that noise impacts would be reduced to acceptable levels and would therefore unnecessarily and unacceptably result in harm to the amenity of neighboring properties by way of noise pollution,” the Lancashire County Council said in a statement on its website.

The recommendations will be considered next week by the county council’s Development Control Committee.

Cuadrilla has “come forward with measures that would mitigate the noise of drilling and fracturing and the proposed noise levels are within the limits set out in government guidance,” the Lichfield, England-based company said in an emailed statement.

Shale-drilling applications by Celtique Energie Ltd. in southern England were rejected last year by the West Sussex County Council and the South Downs National Park Authority.