I echo a lot of the points made already about the temporary nature of this and what we have been promised. I am looking at a briefing from the Department of energy on 4 February. We were given numerous briefings by the Department about this. The Minister tried to avoid pre-legislative scrutiny and our committee had to fight for it. We have a report with 43 recommendations, all of which seem to have been ignored in this Bill. This briefing, which was given to us by the Department as part of our pre-legislative scrutiny, talks about this being "a state-owned gas storage facility" that will be "an emergency reserve" and that it "is not intended for commercial use and will not act as a new entry point for gas into the system". It talks about the reserve only being used "in the event of a major disruption to sub-sea gas pipelines". I do not understand, given everything we were told beforehand, why none of this is in the Bill. What is the Minister afraid of? As Deputy Whitmore has said, it gives rise to a lack of trust for those of us who are trying in good faith to scrutinise this legislation and spending huge amounts of time at the committee and in here putting forward proposals if all of that is simply going to be ignored. If the Minister's belief is that this is to be used in emergency circumstances only, then why not say that explicitly in the Bill? Why not have a definition of what an "emergency" is, as the committee recommended? Our fear is that this is just going to add to national gas demand. It is going to facilitate the importation or additional gas, not just gas to be used in emergency circumstances. That is why I am very supportive of this amendment and the other amendments on the emergency nature of this facility and the temporary nature of the reserve. There is a lot of money being invested in this infrastructure. It was €1 billion last time and it will most likely be more at the next estimate. This is long-term fossil fuel infrastructure that is being built. We want to believe that the Minister that this is only going to be used in emergency circumstances and is not going to be commercially driven but there is nothing in this Bill to give us any confidence in that. That is the problem. That is why we are proposing these amendments and I am supporting them.

Sentiment score: -0.04

I have a couple of points on what the Minister said. As part of our pre-legislative scrutiny, we looked at the energy security review that this is all based on. The review was conducted a number of years ago. The international situation has changed markedly since that review was conducted. Even the price of LNG on the markets has increased massively since Trump's war on Iran. We had asked for that review to be updated in light of the most recent massive market instability in the fossil fuel market. We also believe that review was flawed in terms of the solutions it offered or the potential solutions that it looked at. It seems to have looked at solutions in isolation. We have gone through all of this previously. It looked at this sort of reserve versus an interconnector or the reserve versus a battery, whereas it does not seem to have looked at this strategic LNG reserve versus batteries, interconnectors and wind, or whatever, in a mix like that. We had asked at pre-legislative scrutiny for that to be reviewed prior to this Bill being put forward here, and that just has not been done. Therefore, I do not necessarily accept the Minister's arguments that this is the only way. We all understand that energy security is necessary, just not that this is the only way to achieve that, and that seems to be what the Minister comes back to repeatedly. Something else the Minister mentioned is that the Bill before us today is about the consenting process and that we will see another Bill in due course in relation to the operations of the reserve, but it seems that is an arbitrary distinction and that there is a lot of overlap, and you would imagine there would be a lot of reference points in this Bill that would relate to the operational aspect of a reserve. The Minister has used a lot of strong language, which I welcome, in his commitments regarding how this reserve is going to operate. He said it is not going to increase our State's gas use whatsoever and that it is not going to be commercially run but State owned and temporary. Again, however, we have not seen the heads of the Bill yet. At this point, we have to take all this on trust, with nothing else to refer to, including the decommissioning at the end of this process, when the time comes for the State to decide we do not need this any more. We are taking a lot of things on faith here. As I said, we gave many recommendations to the Minister by the climate committee in its pre-legislative scrutiny that we do not see here or anywhere else. That is why we are taking some of these positions today.

Sentiment score: 0.10

I move amendment No. 4: In page 8, after line 39, to insert the following: " "hydraulically fractured gas” means liquefied natural gas, or natural gas in any other form, that has been produced, in whole or in part, by means of hydraulic fracturing within the meaning of section 5A of the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development Act 1960;" This amendment is about fracked gas, which is not something we have spoken about yet in the debate. The amendment has been tabled with a view to trying to be constructive and to building more safeguards into the use of this facility. It relates to consenting, in that this is the type of product that will be going through a licensed or designated facility and the Government should be cognisant of what is going through, and the State needs to be cognisant of what is being used, in these facilities. If this facility is going to exist, we want the gas being used in it to be the least destructive gas possible. We know that LNG, particularly when sourced from the US as we suspect the LNG for this facility is going to be, is usually derived from fracking but this practice is not defined in the Bill before us. This is why I have included a definition of "hydraulically fractured gas" as meaning "liquefied natural gas, or natural gas in any other form, that has been produced, in whole or in part, by means of hydraulic fracturing within the meaning of section 5A of the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development Act 1960". That Act defines hydraulic fracturing and, as we know, an amendment to that Act in 2017 banned the practice of fracking in Ireland, although not the importation of fracked gas. At the time, the Minister of State spoke of Fianna Fáil's well-known opposition to fracking and acknowledged the detrimental environmental impacts. Unfortunately, a subsequent Government policy statement introducing a de facto ban on the importation of fracked gas was overturned for the purposes of developing this LNG facility. The Government is willingly enabling an incredibly destructive environmental practice so long as others have to deal with the cost. One of the issues we had with the overturning of the ban on the importation of fracked gas was that it was not restricted solely to this facility, which we understand to be a State-led and operated facility. It has essentially created a free-for-all for other commercial operators to import fracked gas as well. We know just how destructive fracked gas is. While burning it produces less carbon dioxide than coal, the extraction processes release enormous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that is up to 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae said earlier to stop talking about climate targets when we are talking about these types of facilities. Okay, but then let us talk about something else. Let us talk about human health and human rights when it comes to fracked gas. We know that North American fracking operations for oil and gas are driving the current surge in global levels of methane. We know that methane has contributed approximately 40% of all global warming to date. We know that fracking is so damaging to the environment. It releases toxic air pollution, contaminates water and results in earthquakes, as well as significant other public health impacts. It is an environmental injustice, with injuries not borne equally by all. There is a reason we banned it here. It is more than a little hypocritical that we would ban it in our own country and for our people but then allow its importation from other countries from where maybe the effects will not be felt so keenly as they are here. We also know that the liquefaction and transportation of natural gas as liquefied natural gas, LNG, raises its greenhouse gas emissions even further, by another 30%. This is because of the need for evaporative cooling and venting and because flaring is used to control pressure during regasification. Just today, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, released a call to action on methane. This all relates back to the imported fracked gas. I am referring to the methane being released. The Secretary General said that methane has been responsible for nearly one third of global warming to date and that it remains significantly underprioritised in climate action and political decision-making. He also said that, "Cutting methane emissions is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective opportunities to slow global warming in the near term while delivering cleaner air, stronger crop yields, improved health and major economic benefits." The UN wants countries worldwide to make methane more measurable, reportable and verifiable. It is looking for transparency and empirical data in relation to reporting methane emissions and so on. All this goes back to this being a regressive move by the State to be facilitating the import of this highly damaging fracked gas, which releases so much methane. At the same time, we are disapplying section 15 of the climate Act from all of this. This means there is even less transparency and less counting of the emissions that this facility will generate. We know that the CEOs of LNG companies would not live beside the facilities their companies build. We can talk about jobs and the economic benefits of all these facilities but they do, worldwide, have serious human health and human rights consequences that I do not think this Government is taking seriously enough. This is why I am proposing this amendment.

Sentiment score: -0.02