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14th December 2007 - Western Mail
Retired engineer claims LNG pipeline is dangerous
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2007/12/14/retired-engineer-claims-lng-pipeline-s-dangerous-91466-20248044/

30th September 2007 - Wales on Sunday
LNG pipeline leak alarm
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/tm_headline=lng-pipeline-leak-alarm&method=full&objectid=19869166&siteid=50082-name_page.html
This report is so serious we highlight it below:-

AN EXPLOSION in Wales’ LNG pipeline would see people and homes caught up in a massive fireball, National Grid documents have revealed.

The company insists the £750m scheme – which will see a huge 150-mile and 48in-wide, gas-filled tube snake across Wales from Milford Haven to Gloucestershire – is safe. Once finished it will provide one-fifth of the UK’s gas.

But the papers, sent to Neath Port Talbot council during the planning process, warn that any pipeline puncture may “give rise to a thermal radiation hazard to individuals in the vicinity of the pipeline if the gas subsequently ignites.

“(This) may be sufficiently large to cause injuries to individuals out of doors in the vicinity of the pipeline. The gas release could continue for some time – tens of minutes – and in some cases it may be a number of hours before the gas leak is isolated and the hazard removed.”

In response to a Freedom of Information request, the Health and Safety Executive’s principal inspector of gas and pipelines, Alan Thayne, said: “If a full bore rupture were to occur, the escaping gas would excavate a crater, extremely noisily.

“Once the momentum of the release had died away, the gas cloud would drift downwind in the prevailing wind direction, diluting as it did so.

“A flash fire back to the source of the release is possible with a subsequent jet fire as the pipeline depressurises.

“In such circumstances anyone close to the release would be burned, possibly fatally.”

Residents living nearby are terrified.

Anti-pipeline campaigner Linda Ware, a 59-year-old grandmother-of-two and mum-of-two, who lives in Cilfrew, said: “They are banking on a leak and an explosion not happening. But when you’re going to be sitting here for the next 30 years it’s not a nice way to live.

“We here in Wales feel that our lives are cheap.”

But a spokeswoman for the company said: “National Grid has 35 years’ experience running gas pipelines during which there has never been a serious incident affecting life or property

AN EXPLOSION in Wales’ LNG pipeline would see people and homes caught up in a massive fireball, National Grid documents have revealed.

“Once the momentum of the release had died away, the gas cloud would drift downwind in the prevailing wind direction, diluting as it did so.

“A flash fire back to the source of the release is possible with a subsequent jet fire as the pipeline depressurises.

“In such circumstances anyone close to the release would be burned, possibly fatally.”

Residents living nearby are terrified.

“We here in Wales feel that our lives are cheap.”

But a spokeswoman for the company said: “National Grid has 35 years’ experience running gas pipelines during which there has never been a serious incident affecting life or property******* See below

We think that there is always a first time for the UK. See NEWS CLIPS & VIDEOS to see what has heppened elsewhere.

Also see the following report.
........ Ed.

*******At Basildon in Essex on 18^th April 2007 a gas explosion occurred where a gas pressure reduction station was at risk from flames from a nearby ruptured pipeline. The emergency services had to evacuate a 2 mile exclusion zone around the pipe for safety. This was half the pressure and size of the pipeline earmarked for Cilfrew. In it’s present position an exclusion zone around the Cilfrew PRI would necessitate the evacuation of Cilfrew, Crynant, Aberdualis, Rhos, Bryncoch, Cadoxton and Tonna.

Friday April 27, 2007
The Guardian

How green was my valley

A 200-mile gas pipeline is being laid down through some of the most beautiful countryside in Wales and the English borders. Few people outside the region have even heard of it - yet the project has been dogged by controversy every step of the way. John Harris reports from the front line

From the A40, the view is dominated by an array of improvised banners daubed with slogans such as "Stop destruction" and "People not pipeline". Once you have come off the road into the small patch of woodland, you are greeted with the scene of a campfire smouldering in a clearing, people making easy-going conversation, and an ad hoc kitchen, stacked with tubs of margarine and blackened bananas.

This is what its residents call the Brecon Protest Camp, sited four miles from the Welsh market town. Dreadlocked eco-desperado types are present and correct - one of the camp's older mainstays is known as "Rancid" - but today they seem to be outnumbered by a less stereotypical kind of activist: students and gap-yearers who say they come here whenever they can.

The camp sits in a patch of land thus far undisturbed by one of the biggest British construction projects of recent times: a 200-mile gas pipeline, the final cost of which is estimated at £840m. Under the ownership and management of the privatised utility National Grid, it will pump a fifth of the UK's natural gas needs from two terminals on the Pembrokeshire coast to an above-ground installation in Gloucestershire, where the pipe will join the existing gas network. (Ten miles or so from Swansea, there is an additional branch of the pipeline, which links up with gas pipes supplying South Wales.) Along the way, it will cut through the Pembrokeshire Coast and Brecon Beacons national parks.

Sooner or later, digging and drilling will begin here. For the protesters, that will mean eviction, so the plan is to take to treehouses, and render the job of getting rid of them as difficult as possible. There are some fears that it may be an ugly process: about a month ago, a man local police "believed to be a protester" was helicoptered to an intensive care unit after being struck by a Land Rover. Two suspects, described by the local press as "pipeline workers", were later arrested and released on bail. National Grid says it has "no comment to make, as this is a matter for the police".

In the protest camp, the people I speak to assure me that the incident involved a visitor rather than one of the regulars. More generally, these protesters - there seem to be 10 to 15 here at any one time - seem less about smash-the-system rhetoric, and more about a gentle kind of bafflement. "We should be spending the money on renewable energy," says Claudia Moseley, a 22-year-old artist based in London. "They tell us they've got to cut emissions, but how's a gas pipe going to help that?"

"Someone has to resist this," says a 20-year-old who gives her name as Hannah. "Obviously, it fits into a bigger thing with renewable energy and all that, but it's also dangerous. Someone's got to be here to prove that it's not something people are happy with." She knows who will win in this ludicrously unbalanced stand-off, but hangs on to more optimistic thoughts. "If the people responsible see that doing this attracts massive protests and leads to loads of uproar, maybe they'll think twice before they do something like this again," she says. "That might be small comfort, but it's important."

Work on the huge pipeline has been much delayed. Currently, a red-earth scar the width of a dual carriageway, peppered with heavy digging equipment and enormous yellow lengths of pipe, stretches across fields and hills from the coast into the borderlands of Wales and England. It is a dramatic sight; it feels shocking that anyone has been allowed to plough such an enormous furrow through such a beautiful landscape. According to the explanatory text on National Grid's website, however, once the pipeline is laid and buried, the countryside will be returned to "its natural beauty".

That this is going on at all will come as news to many English people. Although plans for a small handful of above-ground installations have had to face the usual local planning procedures, most of the route for the pipeline was secured via Whitehall diktat and compulsory purchase orders, so any public consultation was minimal, and the project as a whole, it can be argued, was never subject to any meaningful debate. To many people, the pipeline's arrival speaks volumes about what government and corporate power can pull off in parts of the UK that rarely catch the attention of the London-based media.

All along the route, though, there has been controversy - but it has rarely made it past the local press. After the district council in the Forest of Dean unexpectedly turned down planning permission for the gas plant that will sit at the end of the pipe (thanks to fears of a "considerable adverse impact on the environment"), this week saw the opening of a public inquiry. In South Wales, tussles with another local council have led to a victory for protesters in the high court . . . the stories go on. Underlying these local flashpoints is a mess of very modern issues. Given that North Sea gas is fast running out and there are snowballing anxieties about energy security, policy in that area increasingly seems to verge on the desperate. Oversight and scrutiny regularly fall short of the most basic expectations, even as crucial decisions are apparently taken on the basis that cheapest is usually best. As one of the pipeline's opponents tells me, "People in Britain look for the quickest return, the easiest solution, the make-do-and-mend option."

The pipeline begins in the busy Pembrokeshire port of Milford Haven. On a quick visit here two weeks ago, Tony Blair went on a boat trip around the harbour, where he passed the town's two oil refineries, and then focused his attention on the latest big projects to arrive here: the two huge liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals that will supply the pipe. Some of the locals opposed to the plan came out to greet him, though there was not much common ground. "The way the oil and gas industry work here has created prosperity and jobs, totally revitalising the whole of the local area," Blair told them. As is often the case with events in this part of the world, his appearance in Milford was barely mentioned in the national press.

Planning permission for the gas terminals was granted between 2003 and 2004. At the same time, worries about the risks of LNG prompted the formation of a pressure group called Safe Haven, set on pursuing "serious doubts about the way legislators allowed the LNG developments to proceed". Their aims and methods put them in a very different place from the protesters at the Brecon camp; essentially, their key conviction is that the gas companies and local authorities have ignored even the most basic guidelines, and thereby played fast and loose with Milford Haven's safety.

By way of illustrating his fears, Gordon Main, a locally based film-maker and Safe Haven activist, escorts me aboard a boat called the Lady Courageous, and we set off on an hour-long boat trip past the huge South Hook terminal, co-owned by the Qatar Petroleum company and Exxon Mobil, and hailed as "the biggest LNG-receiving terminal in the world". Our guide is 70-year-old Ian Evans, awarded an OBE for his services to Milford Haven as a pilot, someone charged with boarding visiting ships and bringing them into and out of port.

Rather than building a new landing jetty, Evans explains, the new terminal's owners have taken the much cheaper option of revamping a redundant installation that juts out into the narrow entrance to the UK's fifth busiest port - a stretch of water used not just by thousands of pleasure boats, but huge oil tankers. Terrorism is one of Evans's fears, but he seems even more agitated about another danger. Oil tankers, he says, will have to come within a couple of hundred yards of the gas jetty - and should they even slightly miscalculate their route, there could well be an accident. "These things happen," he says. "It's in the nature of shipping. And if you think you can stop something that weighs 300,000 tonnes, going at four knots, within a few hundred feet . . . well, it's impossible to do that if something goes wrong."

The gas ships arriving at Milford Haven -eventually at the rate of six a week - will come from Qatar and, in the case of the smaller terminal further into the harbour, Malaysia (note: no need here for those unreliable Russians), carrying LNG cooled to -160C. When it is warmed up, it will turn back into gas and expand in volume by a factor of 600. In turn, when it is mixed with air at a concentration of between 5% and 15%, the gas will burn. "Knock a hole in the side of an LNG tanker, and you've got a major, major problem on your hands," says Main. His nightmare scenario, he says, is "the whole of Milford Haven being engulfed by a huge cloud of flammable gas".

"For a long time," he continues, "the people from Exxon Mobil were saying the gas would evaporate harmlessly into the air if it leaked. In fact, because it's so cold when it comes out of the tank-ship, it forms a heavier-than-air gas cloud which drifts with the wind."

Lurking behind a great deal of what he says is an episode that still haunts Milford Haven: the 1996 accident involving the Sea Empress, a tanker that ran aground in the nearby Cleddau Estuary, spilling 72,500 tonnes of oil. In the words of one report from the time, "The mid-channel rocks prised open the starboard tanks like a can opener."

Among the documents that Main has collected over the past two years is a book of guidelines for the LNG industry, put together by Sigtto, the Society of International Gas Tanker and Terminal Operators. "Locations that already attract other craft, including pleasure craft and fishing vessels," it says, "are inherently unsuitable for LNG terminals." It goes on: "Whatever the prevailing circumstances, no terminal should be sited in a position that admits the possibility of being approached by heavy displacement ships, having an inherent capacity for penetrating the hull of an LNG tanker." Perhaps not for the first time, Main affects a look of almost comical desperation.

Ted Sangster, chief executive of Milford Haven's Port Authority, insists that "some of the people making those comments are using the guidelines selectively". He says the advice represents "an ideal", and points to an earlier section of the book, which says that it is not intended as a set of "firm recommendations" and that "local judgments" and "operational circumstances" should also be taken into account. I tell him that phrases such as "inherently unsuitable" and "whatever the prevailing circumstances" suggest something much stronger than that, but he is not having it: "We are following best practice."

When it comes to the idea that terrorists might jump at the chance to take out facilities that will provide a fifth of Britain's gas requirements, Sangster assures me that potential threats to ferries en route to Ireland long ago familiarised Milford Haven with heightened security, and, since 2004, such measures have been ramped up as a result of international agreements. As to the possible results of an LNG spill - "So unlikely as to not be credible," he claims - there is "a wide variety of views of what the consequences could be. Some of them, in my personal view, are wildly speculative." Even in the "worst case", he says, an escaping gas cloud would move no more than "250 or 300 metres" before dispersing into the air, a claim fiercely rejected by Main. "He's just talking about a minor leak, which would be a matter of a few cubic metres of the stuff. And even a cloud that size would travel the width of the shipping channel, so a yacht or a fishing vessel could easily be engulfed."

Seventy miles inland, on one side of the Tawe Valley - Cwmtawe, in Welsh - is a village called Trebanos, home to Rachel Evans and her two youngest children, Chloe, six, and Tom, five. They live in a council house cut into a vertiginous hillside known locally as the Darren, riddled with old mineworkings that have caused no end of local problems. On her street, there are gaps where there used to be eight houses, condemned and demolished because of what one building survey called "severe ground strains". At Chloe and Tom's primary school, lessons take place in a prefab, put there because some of the school's buildings went the same way. In the recent past, the local geology has been deemed so unstable that some residents of Trebanos have been refused a mains gas supply.

To the surprise of many local people, National Grid's plan for the village was to use explosives to make way for its pipeline. As an official report prepared for Neath and Port Talbot borough council later pointed out, for "any blasting pursuant to the development" to happen, government regulations required the approval by the council of a document called a blasting management plan. In retrospect, then, it seems strange that in June last year, the BBC reported that National Grid's contractors were planning "test explosions" in Trebanos without any such agreement.

In an email intended to clear this up, National Grid spokeswoman Caroline Davidson tells me that the company's contractors planned their test blasts to "inform" the plan. When I phone to ask her how this can be squared with the requirement to get official approval for "any explosions", she says: "Pass, because I haven't seen the government regulations, to be honest. You'll appreciate there are so many very, very in-depth things about this project that I can't know the nuances and ins and outs of everything."

Back in the summer of 2006, local councillors did not seem to be much more clued-up. In the view of Evans and her allies, Neath and Port Talbot's planning committee had to be "woken up" to the fact that their consent was required for any explosions, whereupon a meeting was scheduled for August 29. This occasion quickly became notorious. Plans to blast the Trebanos hillside were defeated by 14 votes to 12, but soon after the meeting, the council announced that there had been a "counting error", and the decision no longer stood.

"At six o'clock that evening, I got a phone call from one of the protesters," says Huw Evans, a local Plaid Cymru councillor. "They said: 'You won't believe this: the result's been changed.' I was utterly amazed." At around this point, the Trebanos campaigners say they began to believe that the council's increasingly bizarre machinations were traceable to two things: pressure from Whitehall, exerted through the local Labour party (which, as in just about all of South Wales, is politically dominant) and fear of challenges to their decisions from National Grid.

The "error" meant another meeting, at which things got even more murky. Legal advice claiming that the blasting decision had actually been tied 13-13 was formally endorsed, and the committee decided to refer the issue back to the Department of Trade and Industry. The councillors then turned their attention to another controversial pipeline decision - the proposal to build an above-ground gas installation in the nearby village of Cilfrew. Four independent councillors were told by council officers that because they had met people opposed to the plan, they were ineligible to vote oon the proposal, and it was given the green light by 13 votes to 12. Six months later, thanks to a campaign by the Cilfrew Residents' Association, this decision was overturned by a high court judge, who said the council's culture was such that "it is a wonder that anybody votes on anything", and that the events left a "bad taste".

While the DTI mulled over the blasting decision, Evans and the activists grouped into an organisation called Crag - the Cwmtawe Residents' Action Group - carried on campaigning. They began pressing their local primary school on what would happen if the blasting went ahead. "If that happened," she says, "we wanted them to close the school and find an alternative site, so our kids were safe." The most the school could offer was a promise to "monitor" the effects of any nearby explosions on the classrooms, as they went on. "I felt we were completely marginalised. I realised that our voices didn't count. What was my worst fear? That we'd have another Aberfan - that the mountain would come down on top of the school."

That November, the pitch of the local anti-pipeline campaign was turned up. Having met up with a handful of green activists associated with the eco-protest network Rising Tide, Evans became involved in a plan to set up a camp in Trebanos. "I got a phone call on a Sunday," she says. "They said, 'Good news. We've got people in the pipes.' And I just gave a whoop of delight: 'Fantastic. Brilliant. What can I do?' There were teams of cameramen and God knows what, straight away. My house became a bit of a feeding station: we'd prepare stuff here and take it up in Thermoses. We even thought about doing a vegan Christmas." The camp, however, lasted only 12 days.

By early 2007, the Trebanos campaigners were focusing their efforts on more orthodox methods, regularly turning up at the constituency surgeries held by their MP - Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Wales. "He knew we were holding meetings that were regularly being attended by 100-plus people," says Evans. "When he started to have that kind of feedback, and queries came at him thick and fast, I think he was in peril if he ignored us."

Other local campaigners are more generous, claiming that Hain came to a sincere realisation that the protesters were right. Either way, there is agreement on the occasion when things began to look up: the day they showed their MP maps - successively drawn up by private mine-owners and the National Coal Board - of the "honeycomb" of caverns, mineshafts and water that lay underneath the hillside. "He couldn't have feigned the horror on his face," says Evans. "He's always very tanned, but he went white."

In November last year, the DTI announced that it had ruled out any blasting in Trebanos, forcing the local route of the pipe to be prepared using a much slower technique known as "pecking". A letter from the department to National Grid said that Alastair Darling, the secretary of state for the DTI, had opted to "err on the side of caution". Councillor Huw Evans said the ruling proved "that local politics can work". The BBC reported that National Grid was "disappointed". Five months on, Rachel Evans will happily acknowledge that victory, though continuing work on the pipeline still causes her no end of unease. "I still feel the same," she says. "It's an unsafe project. I don't want that pipe to run with gas, because where we are is too dangerous. If there was a shift or a landslip again, my fear is that the pipe would fracture, and we'd get an enormous gas leak."

National Grid, meanwhile, crisply sums up its view of the work as follows: "Safety is of paramount importance in all aspects of National Grid's work, and we would not consider undertaking the construction of the tunnel at Trebanos to take our natural gas pipeline if we thought there was a risk."

National Grid is contractually obliged to complete the pipeline by October this year. In a 900-word email I receive in response to my questions, it claims still to be "confident" it will meet the deadline, though it admits to facing a "challenging programme". The company's latest headache is the public inquiry that began on Tuesday in a Gloucestershire village hall, focused on plans for an above-ground gas installation in Corse, near the Malvern Hills.

To meet the cost of hiring lawyers to make their case, 600 opponents of the scheme have contributed £60 each; should the plan be turned down, the project will be stalled yet again, and another decision will be referred back to Whitehall.

Back in Pembrokeshire, work on this part of the pipeline is pretty much finished. In Milford Haven, Main leaves me with a sheaf of photocopied research, and he and his dog make their way to the marina's car park. "Places like this have a very clear profile to developers," he says, by way of a parting shot. "There's an unemployment problem, and there's also a sense of low political involvement. If this was happening somewhere else, things would be very different."

His words put me in mind of an angry sentence on a protest website, and a sentiment I have heard echoed in Trebanos, Cilfrew, Brecon and beyond: "They wouldn't put a pipeline like this through Surrey".