Letter: Confusion over pipeline project for New Forest understandable

Last week’s article on the Solent CO2 Pipeline Project’s public consultation revealed an understandable degree of public confusion over the content and context of the project’s plans.

Although the project partners are following the consultancy procedures set out in the Planning Act of 2008 for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, these unfortunately do not include the marine section of the pipeline nor the undersea carbon dioxide storage system itself, both of which must be separately consented.

The resultant ‘division of (bureaucratic) labour’ effectively inhibited detailed public consultation on several aspects of the project of general concern and very relevant to the choice of any of the routing options on offer.

For example, any discussion of pipeline safety issues was inhibited by a lack of specific detail and the fact that safety requirements and procedures are still under active development – industrial scale carbon capture and storage operations (CCS) have only recently been recognised by our Health and Safety Executive as potential major accident hazards, ignored in previous safety regulations.

It is unclear whether any future opportunity will be made available to explore, publicly, such safety issues and the broader, contextual issues (cost-benefit of CCS technology, integrity of undersea storage) which this and several similar projects have raised.

The climate debate seems to have shifted suddenly from a (relatively) well-mannered debate between ‘deniers’ and ‘activists’ into a very active phase where powerful vested interests in the energy sector are impelled to take advantage of government pressures to meet legally binding commitments on emissions reductions by bringing forward industrial scale projects which will affect all our lives, ‘denier’ and ‘activist’ alike.

Our new government looks set to ease the planning process and is preparing to invest significant public funds in these projects (all of which were initiated under previous governments) – yet public ‘debate’ about them has been limited.

For example, none of the CCS projects on offer will reduce the currently excessive carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere and government contracts with suppliers could be governed by the Investment Court System, which allows states to be sued by foreign investors for actions by the state which affect the direct investments by that investor – a course of action which the fossil fuel interests have been very keen to exploit to protect their existing interests.

I believe these considerations make a very strong case for a much more involved public debate.

Jim Gibb,

Norleywood