Liquid gas? Water? Whatever next?
According to the BBC the 6th most read story this morning is about the impending arrival of a tanker! Sarcasm aside this is more interesting because it's the tanker carrying the first cargo of Liquified Natural Gas to the Milford Haven plant in Wales which will be able to supply 25% of the UK's gas needs. Okay, that doesn't actually make it much more exciting but some of you may have been paying attention and realised I was there last week so I'm going to be all snazzy and knowledgeable.
Lucky for me I was there as a guest of one of the ExxonMobil workers so I got a bit of a preview, although as it's a clean site now I wasn't allowed to poke around much. But I did get to see various things with and expert tour guide! I saw the bay the ship will be in and the pipes the gas will flow down, the holding tanks, the expansion tanks, the condensing tanks, the liquid nitrogen tanks, erm, basically lots of tanks. And pipes. Yep, my expert insight is that a gas refinery has pipes and tanks. Bet you all wish you had my kind of inside sources!
Actually the thing that struck me about the BBC article was the safety protesters. Now don't get me wrong, if a gas refinery goes wrong I wouldn't want to be standing too close either, but I'm also thinking they may be a tad wary given they have an oil refinery on their doorstep too! If a LNG tanker springs a leak it be a bit messy but basically the problem should be fairly contained since it should more or less evaporate pretty sharpish. Compare this with say, picking a not entirely random famous incident involving my hosts, Exxon Valdez! Let's be honest here, they got permission to build this thing in a National Park, and you have to be pretty close to see more than a few bulges. I imagine once operations start then you'll see more activity on the site but still. Even the Murco place only really manages a couple of chimneys with a single trail of smoke you can barely see and that's an oil refinery built back in the early 70s before the area became a National Park.
Sure there's a risk with South Hook but I have to say, we need this stuff from somewhere and LNG is a lot nicer than many options.