Fracking company Cuadrilla has requested an urgent review of existing earthquake safety levels, in the hope permission to generate larger tremors will allow it to extract greater quantities of shale gas from Lancashire.

Currently the company must suspend drilling when quakes measuring over 0.5 magnitude are detected.

Though numerous legal challenges and protests were not enough to prevent the company from beginning explorative drilling at its Preston New Road site late last year, it is now the government’s “traffic light system” for seismic activity which the industry appears to consider the greatest threat to its survival.

Despite it emerging that senior figures in the company had believed they would not cause tremors serious enough to halt operations, the company has had to stop drilling on several occasions after surpassing government limits.

In results published today, Cuadrilla said since they began drilling in October last year, they had confirmed there is a “rich reservoir of recoverable high quality natural gas present”, but that the seismic operating limit remains a barrier to the industry.

Shale gas is no more than a long-term possibility for the UK and should not be a key plank of energy policy for the next decade, one of the most senior Liberal Democrats in the cabinet has warned.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, told the Guardian shale gas would not be a reality in the UK for at least a decade, and that energy policies should focus on renewable energy.

His views are at odds with the attitude of many senior members of the Tory party, who have spoken out in favour of shale gas exploitation as a form of indigenous energy that could bring down energy bills and an alternative to investment in renewable energy.

David Cameron, the prime minister, recently announced that the government was going “all out” for shale gas. But Cable was notably cooler, telling the Guardian: “Shale gas is a long-term possibility – no more than that.”

He said renewable energy offered more immediate opportunities. “Big renewable energy commitments in offshore wind, and nuclear – these are things that are actually happening, are going ahead.”

He added: “I do realise there are some people who are a bit carried away with shale gas.”

The US government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report that it now estimated Britain’s “technically recoverable shale resources” at 26 trillion cubic feet (tcf), compared with annual UK gas consumption of about 3 tcf.

The EIA also said for the first time that it believed Britain had shale oil, estimating that some 700m barrels could be extracted.

The figures indicate the volumes that the UK should be able to extract from the ground using current technology, but do not take into account whether or not it will be economic to do so.

The report warns of opposition to shale gas extraction in the UK and says fracking “got off to an abysmal start” after Cuadrilla caused earth tremors near Blackpool in 2011.

Fracking involves blasting water and chemicals into the ground to “hydraulically fracture” the rock, extracting the gas or oil trapped within it.

Advocates of shale gas, which is extracted by the controversial process of ‘fracking’, hope it can transform the UK energy landscape, heralding a new era of cheap energy as it has in the US. Chancellor George Osborne has said Britain should not “be left behind as gas prices tumble on the other side of the Atlantic”.

But Christof Rühl, BP’s chief economist, said it foresaw “extremely limited growth” in shale gas in Europe. “Europe has various problems: environmental concerns, outright bans on fracking, a lack of infrastructure and a long tradition of not minding so much having to import things,” he said.

Shale gas would play a role only nearer to 2030 and “only to a very small extent”, he said. “I think that is also the story for the UK. There will be some projects starting here, maybe earlier than on the continent, but it’s not likely to be a big game-changer in the natural gas market, where we have these declines in the North Sea to compensate.

“It takes years to actually generate and unlock shale production in Europe, where infrastructure is so much less developed than it was in the US. It takes an enormous amount of drilling and rigs to unlock shale,” he said