Letter: Fawley refinery plan is a pipeline to profit-making
MY background is 40 years as a small cog on very large projects: nuclear, on and off-shore oil and gas, chemical, fertiliser, PET plants – 30 years outside England.
You name it, if an accountant somewhere saw a profit, we’d build it.
I did one pipeline. No discourtesy to anyone but we all need to understand these projects. They are to make money, nothing else. The operator’s intent is never to save the planet, go green or be nice to anyone. It’s to make a profit.
So once approved, the operator, design consultant and site team will all seek to modify the project to cut costs and make more profit. And the NPA, Forestry England, etc, will not have the knowledge, skills or muscle to stick to the plan.
It may not even go underground. Larger machines, more roads and damage, permanent access restrictions and destruction of the Forest that will outlast this civilisation are inevitable.
The New Forest is the smallest and most densely populated national park in England, already crossed by motorways, major roads, towns and villages.
I’ve done a pipeline. If the Forest is encumbered by one, it will be a precedent for the end of the National Park.
Peter Padfield
Holmsley
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MY wife and I went to the ExxonMobil pipeline presentation at Milford.
We have real concerns about all the possible routes being considered.
This area is a mix of chalk, gravel and clay, inherently unstable and even more so with the extremes of wet and dry weather that we have experienced in the last few years. Installation will be a prolonged period of disruption, but more significantly, pipe fractures are a real risk after installation with such unstable geology.
The New Forest is a national park in order to continue the protection it has enjoyed for over 900 years. Such an industrial project in this area would cause permanent environmental damage even with careful restoration work.
Unless a route along the Solent sea bed is feasible, we cannot see any route which gives a satisfactory result for both the oil firm and the local community.
BH & JM Sherrad
Barton
