Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is critical to the State’s energy security, a member of the Government’s infrastructure taskforce warned on Tuesday.
The Oireachtas passed legislation this year giving Minister for Energy Darragh O’Brien power to bypass planning laws to approve a proposed State LNG storage project.
Businessman Seán O’Driscoll, a member of the Government’s Accelerating Infrastructure Task Force, told the Institute of Directors annual conference that he had heard arguments in the media that the Republic does not need LNG.
“Thirty per cent of our primary energy is gas,” he said, adding that it came through a pipeline from Scotland.
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“If anything happens those pipelines, our economy shuts down in three or four hours. For people to peddle the line, and get away with it, that we don’t need LNG facilities, is complacency,” O’Driscoll argued.
He remarked that the State took a lot of risks with its energy system. While it depends on imported oil for 50 per cent of its energy, its strategic reserve amounts to just 90 days’ supply, O’Driscoll added.
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Speaking afterwards, he said the enactment of the Critical Infrastructure Act and new planning laws showed the Government’s commitment to overhauling the State’s system for planning and building infrastructure.
The infrastructure legislation means that key projects move to the top of the planning system’s queue. Government has since earmarked nine projects in transport, energy and water as critical infrastructure.
Those projects include the MetroLink, Shannon-Dublin water scheme, and North-South Interconnector, a high-capacity electricity line between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
That project was announced 20 years ago and has made it through the planning systems on both sides of the Border, but is not expected to be completed until 2031.
O’Driscoll said it was up to local and national politicians to win public acceptance for the project, which has met strong opposition from locals and landowners along the proposed route.
“These things have to be built; political leaders will have to step up,” he insisted.
The absence of the long-delayed project costs electricity users North and South €100 million extra a year, he said.
O’Driscoll is a former chairman of industrial group Glen Dimplex and of the Economic and Social Research Institute.
The infrastructure taskforce identified four key areas that Government needed to tackle to speed up the construction of projects vital to the State: legal reform, regulatory reform, co-ordination and public acceptance.
O’Driscoll said he concurred “100 per cent” with Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers’ remark last week that Government was working on unprecedented levels of change on the State’s systems for planning and building infrastructure.
Actual building of the MetroLink, tying Dublin’s city centre with its airport, could begin in February 2027, while State utility Uisce Éireann hopes to begin construction of the €1.3 billion wastewater project, the Greater Dublin Drainage scheme, shortly. That should be completed in 2030.
