By a former employee of Shell Oil USA
John,
As you know, I am not fond of the way Shell normally operates, but in some ways I find the arguments over the safety of the proposed Corrib pipeline to be based on uninformed ignorance and border upon silly paranoia.
I can understand the heated arguments about resource development policy, licensing royalties, taxes, the route of the pipeline, etc. Nobody wants one in their back yard. And there are very legitimate concerns about environmental disturbances. All of those debates are worth engaging in.
But I do not understand the arguments about pipeline safety. The engineering world has decades worth of experience designing high and low pressure gas pipelines and knows how to build those things so that they are very safe operationally.
Here in the US there are literally tens of thousands of miles of buried gas pipeline. Some high pressure, some low pressure. Some of it is offshore, but most is onshore. They cross rivers, large and small, and cross mountain ranges, large and small. These pipelines have operated for decades with very few incidents of failure. Most problems come from construction accidents, where people dig up the smaller lines up my mistake.
It simply doesn’t pay the investors, Shell and their partners, to built and operate a pipeline in an unsafe manner. That would be criminally negligent and financially irresponsible. Shell and their partners are in this project for one reason and one reason only. To make money. Keep that in mind.
The protesters should focus on what is important.
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