The drive by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to spur a shale gas revolution is foundering before it’s even started, Bloomberg said Feb. 11.

In the past three weeks, Scotland and Wales temporarily banned hydraulic fracturing until they study new environmental safeguards. While the U.K. Parliament rejected a similar moratorium, the government accepted calls by opposition lawmakers to ban fracking in national parks and beauty spots.

Eighteen months after then-energy minister, Michael Fallon, said he expected as many as 40 new wells over two years, none has been drilled amid opposition from campaigners and residents near planned sites. The faltering U.K. ambitions to lower its dependence on fossil fuel imports follow disappointments in Poland and leave Europe with little hope of emulating the U.S. shale gas boom.

“The economics of this are different in the U.K. because we have a densely populated island, whereas America has vast areas where there are very, very few people,” Tessa Munt, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker who quit her job in government after voting against its fracking proposals, said in an interview. “I can imagine that our policy will be quietly abandoned. It’s going to be quite difficult to get public support for this.”

In Poland, major oil companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) and Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) exited the country after disappointing results from prospective wells.

No fracking has taken place since the U.K. lifted a moratorium in December 2012, even with companies such as IGas Energy Plc, Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. and Ineos Group lining up to tap the country’s shale for oil and gas. With Cameron saying he was “jealous” of U.S. success in shale, Osborne brought in what he described as a “generous” tax regime for the industry.

“Shale gas is part of the future, and we will make it happen,” Osborne said in his March 2013 budget speech.

That ambition has yet to materialize. The Scottish government on Jan. 28 announced a fracking moratorium, pending the results of a public consultation, and the Welsh Assembly voted for its own ban on Feb. 4.

“Ineos understands the importance of public consultation to assess the impact of unconventional oiland gas,” Richard Longden, a spokesman, said in an email on Jan. 28. The Rolle, Switzerland-based company last year pledged $1 billion to develop shale gas.

Ineos, which operates the Grangemouth refinery and chemicals site in Scotland, has about 15 years’ supply of U.S. gas to run through the plants starting next year, Tom Crotty, a company director, said by email Feb. 11. The long-term success of the site depends on the U.K. developing its own shale gas resources, he said.

The plants faced closure in 2012 after supplies from the North Sea declined.

Energy Minister Amber Rudd on Jan. 26 accepted safeguards proposed by the opposition Labour Party and gave in to demands from lawmakers, saying she would agree to “an outright ban on fracking in national parks, sites of special scientific interest and areas of outstanding natural beauty.”

Such a ban would affect 97% of 931 English fracking blocks examined, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.

Fracking involves blasting water, sand and chemicals down wells to create fissures in shale rock, letting oil and gas flow to the surface.

While a drilling renaissance in shale rock sparked a boom in the U.S. with enough crude to exceed the reserves of Saudi Arabia, according to some producers, some have been vulnerable to the almost 50% slump in oil prices over the past six months. Continental Resources Inc. (NYSE: CLR), the biggest operator in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, slashed its 2015 spending plan by 41% in December to $2.7 billion.

“The prime minister has been absolutely clear that we think extracting domestic shale has the potential to create jobs and make us less reliant on energy from abroad,” Cameron’s spokeswoman, Helen Bower, said Feb. 6. With new measures working through Parliament, “there will be areas of England where we can continue to have exploration.”

The government says its tax breaks will boost jobs and cut reliance on imports as conventional oil and gas reserves in the North Sea decline. It’s also trying to win communities over by promising that companies will pay for each well drilled, and plow back 2% of production revenue.

An area in northern England known as the Bowland Basin might hold as much as 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas, enough to meet U.K. demand for almost 50 years. Other areas, such as Scotland and wealthy southern counties, might also hold billions of barrels of oil.

Thousands of residents living near potential shale gas sites have taken their objections about traffic and noise to councils, which have rejected planning applications. Environmentalists are concerned that drilling into shale rock might taint water and cause earthquakes, while the associated industrialization disfigures the countryside.

Even so, IGas plans to drill wells this year in the East Midlands and northwest England, it said in a Feb. 3 email.

“As an industry, we listen to public concerns and work closely with the communities,” said Andrew Austin, CEO of the London-based company.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s own polling, published on Feb. 3, showed just 24% of people say they support shale gas. That’s down from 27% a year ago, when the government first asked the question.

While opinion polls indicate neither the ruling Conservatives nor the opposition Labour Party winning enough seats to take overall power in the May 7 election, all three of the U.K.’s main parties are in favor of tapping shale. Still, negotiations over forming a coalition might delay efforts to devise regulations for the industry.

“The government has massively underestimated popular opposition to fracking,” Caroline Lucas, the country’s only Green Party lawmaker, said in an interview. “What’s striking is when Members of Parliament are faced with a fracking proposal in their own constituency, they get worried and their views tend to change. They get more worried the more they read about it.”

Lucas was arrested in 2013 for protesting against drilling at Cuadrilla’s conventional oil well site at Balcombe in Sussex, before being cleared of any offenses. Work at Balcombe was halted, and Cuadrilla faced a further setback last month when planners in Lancashire in northern England recommended local authorities should reject applications to drill at two new sites. The final decision has been delayed.

“I am confident shale gas will take off in U.K. and Europe because of the fundamentals of supply and demand,” Cuadrilla CEO Francis Egan said at a conference in London on Feb. 10. “I’ve spent 3 1/2 years of my life and not drilled a well. I’m not giving up.”