It will be interesting to see how the environmentally sensitive French react to the widespread use of the controversial hydraulic drilling technology known as “fracking” on their home turf.

Toreador Resources, a Texas oil company, has been awarded drilling rights to 750,000 acres of the Paris Basin, its licenses stretching for hundreds of kilometers from St Dizier, on the edge of the Champagne region, to Montargis, just south of the royal palace of Fontainebleau according to an article in The Australian.

Craig Mackenzie, chief executive of the Dallas based Toreador Resources is reported as saying the company wants to start drilling three pilot wells early in 2010, at a cost of US$30million, and to be producing oil from them by the end of the year.