Dublin Shell to Sea

Much of the coverage of the Corrib Gas Protest in Mayo has focused on the contentious protest and policing. But what motivated the protest in the first place? Many of the local people at first welcomed the announcement that gas had been discovered, with the promises of jobs and investment locally. However, a few who looked more closely at the proposed project made alarming discoveries.

In November 2009 An Bord Pleanála found that up to half of the final section of Shell’s proposed route for the onshore pipeline was ‘unacceptable’ on safety grounds. Shell had planned, as a cost saving measure, to pipe raw gas through the communities of Pollathomais and Rossport to be processed at an inland refinery. This meant the pipeline running past their houses would contain raw gas, including naturally occurring corrosive and toxic chemicals, directly from the sea bed. The pressure in this pipeline would be up to 345 bar at the landfall site, then being lowered to 144 bar to be piped through the village of Rossport. The tyre-pressure of a normal car is about 2 bar. Bord Gáis (refined) gas pipelines run through towns and cities at 4 bar.¹⁶

Normal practice worldwide is to use a refinery on a platform at sea or in a remote region to reduce the pressure of the gas, to add a smell to warn of leaks, and to clean the gas of naturally-occurring corrosive and toxic chemicals, before piping it to a populated region.¹⁷

^{“I don’t think that any company, including Shell, will introduce expensive safety measures unless they have to”
Christy Loftus – Shell E&P Ireland Communications Officer}

Further study showed that the cleansing of the gas in the refinery would generate thousands of tons of heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury, and that the outflow pipe for the refinery’s discharges would be simply released into shallow water less than 3km offshore. The location of the outflow pipe meant that this pollution would be circulated back into the bay, affecting fishing, an important source of income in the area. In addition, gas flaring¹⁸, the burning off of unusable excess gas into the air, (a practice which the Nigerian Government is banning from January 2010 due to its detrimental effects on local people’s health and the environment) would add eight million cubic metres per day of pollutants to the air (for every cubit foot of gas extracted, a cubic foot of heavily polluting emissions will be released into the air, amounting to a trillion cubic feet of emissions over the lifetime of the project), which would result in formation of acid rain and formaldehyde locally. In addition, there is a requirement to store thousands of tonnes of methanol, propane gas and highly toxic waste oil condensate on site. Any spillage will run into Carrowmore Lake, the only source of tap water for 10,000 people. Accidental spillages of chemicals into local waterways have already occurred during construction.

Residents are not reassured by Shell’s affirmations of safety, especially in light of its record elsewhere. Shell has been convicted in the UK, Nigeria, USA, South Africa, Brazil & Canada for environmental damage, fatal accidents, and health & safety violations. In the USA two boys and a teenager were killed when a Shell pipeline exploded in Washington state in 1999. Shell paid out $85 million in a settlement of civil and criminal charges to the USA Department of Justice and the EPA. Representatives of the Ogoni community in Nigeria have visited Rossport and warned that Shell’s presence in Ogoniland saw it impoverished, militarised and devastated by oil pollution and gas flaring.

On the Corrib project to date, Shell has:
• breached planning permission and been ordered to dismantle 3km of illegally constructed pipeline;
• been forced to build a freshwater treatment plant after contaminating the region’s primary drinking water supply;
• omitted vital information from their planning application regarding the emissions of raw gas to the atmosphere during the cold venting process.

“For years SPDC [Shell Petroleum Development Company] has engaged in practices known to be damaging to the environment and people [in Nigeria]. Pipelines were not adequately maintained. Waste products were released into the environment. Shell today refuse to acknowledge most problems associated with their operations in the Niger Delta”¹⁹
Amnesty International, 2009

 From the Dublin Shell to Sea information pack - Download a PDF file (46mb) of the information pack.

16 Storey, Andy, The Corrib Gas Dispute: Background and Current Status, 2009
17 Centre for Public Inquiry, The Great Corrib Gas Controversy, 2005, p36
18 For more information on this widely denounced practice, please see http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/gas_flaring_nigeria.pdf
19 Amnesty International, Nigeria: Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta, 2009, Amnesty International Publications