Posts under ‘Shell to Sea Campaign’

SHELL is working on a submission for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the discharge of water which will be separated from the gas, writes Marian Harrison. The company agreed with fishermen not to discharge the treated water into the Sruwaddacon Bay and are investigating alternative options before seeking permission from the EPA.

The Irish Times – Friday, March 5, 2010

MARY CAROLAN and LORNA SIGGINS

THE STATE and oil giant Shell have lost their bid to stop two Mayo residents pursuing High Court claims as to whether a ministerial consent given eight years ago for the Shell Corrib gas pipeline is valid.

Ms Justice Mary Laffoy ruled yesterday that Brendan Philbin and Bríd McGarry were entitled to have that issue and other public law claims determined by the court.

Responding to the ruling , Ms McGarry of Gortacragher, Co Mayo, said last night that she was “delighted that we can continue with our counter-claim”.

Ms McGarry and her mother Teresa owned 20 per cent of the land on the original Corrib gas pipeline route.

McGarr Solicitors, acting for Ms McGarry and Rossport landowner Mr Philbin, said the defendants welcomed the judgment. Shell EP Ireland said it had no comment to make.

The residents claim it is in the public interest to have the court decide the issues.

Among the issues they want determined is whether the consent of the minister for natural resources of April 2002 for the gas pipeline was valid. They are also challenging the constitutionality of provisions of the Gas Act 1976 under which the consent was provided.

In preliminary motions, the State and Shell had asked Ms Justice Laffoy to rule that the residents were out of time to bring claims for orders quashing the ministerial consent and various compulsory purchase orders over certain lands acquired for the pipeline, including lands of Mr Philbin.

The residents had set out their claims in 2005 in a defence and counterclaim to proceedings brought against them by Shell, which led to five men, including Mr Philbin, known as the Rossport Five spending 94 days in jail after refusing to abide by an order not to interfere with the pipeline work.

Shell later discontinued its proceedings after saying it would seek an alternative route but the residents want to proceed with their counter-claim.

Ms Justice Laffoy found while the reliefs sought fell within the scope of the relevant court rules, the time limits set out in those rules did not apply in the circumstances of this case.

She said the challenge to the ministerial consent and the compulsory acquisition orders was first initiated by the residents via their defence to a private law action by Shell against them.

In that action, Shell relied on the validity of the consent and acquisition orders to establish the lawfulness of and justify its actions against the residents, she said. The residents claimed Shell’s conduct was unlawful and were seeking remedies in those circumstances.

If she was wrong and the time limits applied, she believed the residents had not set out good reasons for extending the time limits.

The impugned consent and other instruments related to a major infrastructural project involving enormous expenditure by Shell and the residents were not entitled to take a tactical decision to postpone their public law challenge pending the outcome of the planning process.

The judge noted the court’s jurisdiction to review the constitutionality of provisions of the Gas Act 1976 is derived from the Constitution. Once a person has the necessary legal standing to bring such a challenge, no time limit could curtail that jurisdiction, she said.

The judge ruled the residents were not barred from pursuing the claims advanced in the public law module of their case.

The Irish Times – Thursday, February 18, 2010

LORNA SIGGINS Marine Correspondent

SHELL EP Ireland has confirmed that work on several key aspects of the Corrib gas project will not now take place this year.

The company told The Irish Times yesterday that the decision was taken for “operational and community reasons”.

It will undertake further work on the offshore pipeline this year, but intends to take an “integrated approach” to the offshore/onshore dimension next year, when it hopes that “permitting processes” will be “further advanced”.

In a letter to stakeholders issued by Shell managing director Terry Nolan, he says that the laying of the 84m umbilical, which provides the link between the Ballinaboy terminal and the Corrib field for remote control of subsea gas production facilities, will be postponed until next year.

The company explained yesterday that the umbilical laying would have involved re-establishing a works site at the Glengad landfall.

“In the past this has been a site where tensions have arisen during works. Having no works site there in 2010 will, it is hoped, minimise the exposure of the local community to such potential tensions,” its communications adviser Colin Joyce said.

The Corrib gas partners are awaiting a final decision from An Bord Pleanála on the onshore pipeline and have sought an extension to May 31st to provide further information on their application under the Strategic Infrastructure Act. Last November, An Bord Pleanála found that up to half of the proposed new onshore pipeline route was “unacceptable” on safety grounds, due to proximity to housing.

It suggested that the developers explore another route, up the Sruwaddacon estuary, but the company has said it is satisfied that the current proposed route meets all international safety standards.

In recent correspondence with An Bord Pleanála, Shell consultants RPS have queried aspects of the Bord Pleanála finding.

The Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources chief technical officer Bob Hanna also criticised the decision, arguing that it was based “solely on consequence” with no attention given to mitigating measures. Mr Hanna has intimated that the planning board’s approach may establish a “precedent” which could have “the effect of prohibiting all significant infrastructure developments”.

Mr Hanna’s intervention has been criticised by Shell to Sea in Mayo, which also held a protest outside Castlerea prison yesterday in support of fisherman Pat O’Donnell. Mr O’Donnell was given a seven-month sentence last week for his part in surrounding a Garda car during a cavalcade in September 2008 and a separate public order offence at Glengad.

Mr O’Donnell’s boat was sunk in Broadhaven Bay last year in controversial circumstances, ahead of offshore pipeline laying. “Pat O’Donnell and his family have become only the latest victims of abuse as a result of the Corrib gas project,”community group Pobal Chill Chomáin has said.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Last November, something interesting happened. It turned out that the headbangers of the Erris peninsula, the “extremists” who have been blocking the completion of Shell’s Corrib Gas project, were neither crazy nor extreme. An Bord Pleanála wrote to Shell’s planners, rejecting the proposed route for half of the gas pipeline, in terms that largely vindicated the protesters.

Prominent Shell to Sea campaigner Maura Harrington, who was convicted by Judge Groarke yesterday of obstructing a gate with her car at the Shell compound in Glengad on August 13th, 2008, will be sentenced tomorrow.

But the officials didn’t even stop to blink. They tipped their forelocks to the oil executives, gave a two-finger salute (metaphorically speaking, of course) to the local residents and told the hearing they were entirely satisfied with the project. The rest, as they say, is history

EXTRACTS

As the road approaches the Shell gas terminal at Ballinaboy on Ireland’s Atlantic west coast, only the posters pinned to the telegraph poles give any hint of the country’s longest-running environmental protest.

…for the past four years this remote but beautiful corner of north Mayo has been the setting for a bitter industrial dispute. At times, hundreds of police have been deployed to break up pickets. And this summer, the tiny hamlets of Glengad and Rossport looked on as two Irish navy frigates moored in Broadhaven Bay, apparently there to stop the protesters’ dinghies interfering with the Solitaire, Shell’s vast pipe-laying ship.

Exactly how a grass-roots campaign led by a retired schoolteacher and a handful of hill farmers and lobster pot fishermen has frustrated Ireland’s most important energy project perplexes industry experts.

…this tiny group, with its headquarters in a huddle of tents in a field overlooking Broadhaven Bay, has consistently outwitted Shell’s vast public relations apparatus.

Shell, by contrast, has been flat-footed. Its decision in 2005 to resort to the courts is now seen, even by company officials, as counter-productive. Three farmers and two retired schoolteachers, quickly dubbed the Rossport Five, were sent to prison for defying a court order to let Shell on to their fields and became overnight celebrities in a country that loves a rebel.

“Shell took the local people for idiots,” says Pat O’Donnell…

FULL FT ARTICLE (SUBSCRIPTION)

By Gordon Deegan

Saturday, November 07, 2009

SHELL Ireland has received a €90 million cash injection to complete its controversial works to allow gas be taken from the Corrib gas field.

The cash injection to Shell E&P Ireland Ltd from its parent company is confirmed in documents recently lodged with the Companies’ Office.

The €90m represents a 28% increase in the company’s share capital to €344m.

A spokesman for Shell E&P Ireland confirmed that the injection of equity “is towards the development costs of the final phases of the project”.

The Corrib field could produce enough gas to meet 75% of Ireland’s peak winter gas needs for up to a decade.

An Bord Pleanála found this week that up to half of Shell’s proposed route for its Corrib gas onshore pipeline in Co Mayo is “unacceptable” on safety grounds.

A subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, Shell E&P Ireland now has three months in which to provide An Bord Pleanála with revised proposals for an alternative pipeline route to bring the gas onshore.

A company spokesman said yesterday: “The current window for project completion is year-end 2010/early 2011. It is too early to say whether the recent correspondence from An Bord Pleanála will have an impact on this schedule.”

It is now seven years since the Corrib gas project plan was approved by Government.

However, since then the proposal — sparked by safety fears — has become mired in controversy, including the jailing of the “Rossport Five” in 2005 and a number of confrontations between gardaí and protesters at the site of the Bellanaboy gas processing terminal in north Mayo.

Over 850 people are employed by Shell on the construction of the terminal at Bellanaboy.

The Shell spokesman said: “The terminal is over 80% complete and a period of operational qualification of the terminal is expected to take place in 2010.”

Accounts for 2008 have yet to be filed by Shell E&P Ireland. However, in the company’s returns to the end of 2007, they show that accumulated losses were €121m, due largely to developing the Corrib gas field.

The filings show that the losses would have been much higher but for Shell E&P Ireland Ltd receiving tax credits from the exchequer totalling €28m in the four years to the end of 2007, paying no net tax during that period.

The spend associated with the project almost breached €100m at the end of 2007, while losses include €40m in exploration costs written off since 2004.

However, the accounts show that the company’s book value of the Corrib gas field under development has almost doubled in three years, going from €230m at the end of 2004 to €422m at the end of 2007.

Last June, one of the partners in the project, US oil company Marathon, sold its share of the Corrib gas field to Canadian rival Vermilion in a deal potentially worth $400m (€285m).

Discovered in 1996, the gas field contains 1 trillion cubic feet of gas and has an estimated field life of 15 to 20 years.

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, November 07, 2009

Shell to Sea spokesperson Maura Harrington said: “What An Bord Pleanala have really shown today is that the Corrib Gas pipeline is not safe to be routed through our community, or indeed any residential area.

The board has suggested that Shell E&P Ireland and its Corrib gas partners explore another route, up the Sruwaddacon estuary, and has given the company three months to come back with detailed information on the route, design and safety of the high pressure pipe. In a four page letter issued today, the board says that the current application “does not present a complete, transparent and adequate demonstration” that the high pressure pipeline “does not pose an unacceptable risk to the public”.