Madam, - I wrote to The Irish Timesmore than three years ago praising the decision to grant planning permission for the Corrib gas treatment plant. Your report that the EPA has now approved an operating licence for the plant is therefore doubly welcome ( The Irish Times, November 14th).
Our need for a secure, diverse and relatively clean energy supply is well known, bearing in mind that, in the event of an accidental severing of the single pipeline that links us today to the North Sea gas fields, we would have only a 30-minute reserve of natural gas. Very soon, as North Sea production declines, our gas will be coming from much further away and will be subject also to the whims of political and labour disputes in Russia and other countries in between.
Corrib gas is vital to our nation's energy security as the global competition for energy intensifies daily and the finite nature of those resources becomes ever more apparent. The recent International Energy Agency report entitled World Energy Outlook 2007 makes this abundantly clear.
But Corrib is not enough. I have been advocating for some time that the country needs, in addition to Corrib, a liquefied natural gas storage facility coupled to a natural gas fuelled power plant with near-zero carbon dioxide emissions. A proposed LNG-receiving terminal operated by a private company on the banks of the Shannon goes some way towards this aim.
Last week's RTÉ Prime Timeprogramme on this proposal, however, was depressingly familiar with the usual tired arguments trotted out and no clear vision presented of the alternatives.
The Shannon region has huge potential as the energy capital of Ireland. Coal-fired Moneypoint and an LNG-burning plant could be complemented by wave energy devices offshore, with all three feeding electrical power into our single high-efficiency electricity transmission grid.
Until nuclear fusion reactors provide virtually unlimited electrical power and hydrogen is used as an energy vector, we need to have secure, reliable and diverse supplies of energy. What is the alternative? - Yours, etc,
JOHN SIMMIE, Furbo, Galway.