The South(fork) Downs: Outrage as oil barons bid to drill in Sussex beauty spot

Apart from the oil barons sniffing about, that is.

This corner of the South Downs in West Sussex could be the next place where prospectors strike black gold.

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With oil prices rocketing, even the smallest of underground reserves could prove extremely valuable.

The real-life equivalent of J.R. Ewing – the oil baron from Southfork ranch in TV's Dallas – is Richard Latham, the chairman of publicly-listed Northern Petroleum.

His company has been given permission for three years of drilling and exploration, but would need to apply for separate permission to extract oil.

The company is also targeting parts of Kent and Hampshire including historic Hurst Castle near the Isle of Wight, the Daily Mail has discovered.

The Downs site at Markwells Wood, near Chichester, is reported to contain up to 200million barrels of fuel potentially worth £12billion.

On Tuesday, West Sussex County Council's planning committee voted to allow Northern Petroleum to chop down a hectare of woodland, concrete the area and build a 120ft drilling rig – the height of seven double-decker buses.

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Council officers said there was a "clear and overriding need" for oil exploration in the UK.

Mr Latham yesterday welcomed the planning decision and promised safeguards to protect the environment.

The company has agreed to plant more woodland around the site and restore the area to its "original" form once it has finished operations there.

The centuries-old woodland is officially an area of outstanding natural beauty and likely to be awarded national park status in a few months.

Conservationists are outraged at the drilling.

Alice Farr of the Woodland Trust said: "This is an act of vandalism. The council has given the go-ahead for the initial destruction of a hectare of ancient woodland, the richest habitat for species in the UK, the UK's equivalent of rainforests.

"The complex undisturbed soils are irreplaceable and once destroyed, lost forever.

"This is the start of a whole wave of destruction in the area. How far does it go?"

A resident living near the site, John Simons, objected to the plans because he said buzzards, badgers, foxes, hares, stoats, weasels and a variety of songbirds would be affected.

There were other official objections from the council's own landscape officer and ecology expert.

However there was no objection from Natural England (formerly English Nature) or the Environment Agency.

The law allows exploration for valuable minerals such as oil even in national parks if the potential benefits outweigh the destruction caused.

Planning committee chairman Mick Hodgson said: "There were objections which we had to balance. Our job was to interpret the rule book as we saw it on the day."

He said the council did not own the land and would not receive a share the profits if oil was discovered.

As with North Sea oil, the Treasury would receive approximately 50 per cent of the proceeds, with the oil company and its partners pocketing the rest.

■ The southern coast of England has several small onshore oil deposits spanning 70 miles, from Poole in Dorset to Chichester in West Sussex.

There are already 144 production wells and 157 exploration wells across the region, typically more than 100ft deep.

The biggest known deposit is Wych Farm in Purbeck, Dorset, which produces 85,000 barrels a day – making it Western Europe's largest onshore oilfield.

One barrel yields about 20 gallons of petrol. Scientists say the large amounts of limestone and sandstone beneath Hampshire, Sussex and Dorset make perfect conditions for large oil deposits.

And Northern Petroleum has estimated that up to 200million barrels could be under parts of Sussex, which is the same as a big discovery in the North Sea.

Oil is already being drawn in Singleton, in West Sussex, from a pumping station which began operating in 1991 and filled 29,537 barrels last year alone.

Oil companies have also made explorations for oil off the Isle of Wight and the Dorset coast with plans at one stage for an artificial island to be constructed in the English Channel.