Professor Barry McMullin:

I do not see anybody dispute it but it obviously depends on the assumption one makes about the decline in gas consumption. If that does not materialise then yes, we are in a different world in many ways. Insofar as there is debate about it, that is where the debate hinges. I do not think there is any debate that in the event we collectively deliver at European level, and Ukraine has certainly concentrated minds much more on that, on reducing our overall consumption of natural gas for security and climate reasons, we will see an emerging excess of LNG capacity Europe-wide in a relatively short number of years. It will probably already be the case in five years. That is the backdrop.

On the Deputy's second question on whether it is the view, particularly in the context of the Corrib depletion, that reliance on just the two pipelines to Great Britain and that the risk profile of that is too great, what further local domestic mitigation should we engage in? My view is that the more strategic thing is a gaseous storage facility. One of the two most promising prospects for that are reopening the Kinsale Head field. That is not a trivial engineering matter but the committee might consider inviting representatives from the ESB Group who are in the process of studying this to brief them on that. That certainly is one possibility and because it previously operated successfully we can have reasonable confidence in the technical possibility for that. It is strategic because of the potential for repurposing. It will not be next year. It will be on a five-year timeline but the committee would need to get the experts in to hear about that.

The other project is not in the jurisdiction but on the island. As the committee will know well, energy systems are strongly integrated across the island of Ireland in both jurisdictions. There is a commercial project proposal for the development of a gas storage facility in Northern Ireland in Islandmagee. There is some local controversy around that but technically there are salt geology deposits in that area and salt cavern storage is one of the most common storage technologies used for natural gas storage across Europe where that particular geology is available. There is a commercial developer who is interested in developing gas storage on that site. It is outside this jurisdiction but if it were developed, obviously it has the potential to mitigate security of supply risks in this jurisdiction also.

There is a strategic interest in respect of that and in respect of potential collaboration with the United Kingdom and with the devolved Government, if it can be reinstated, in Northern Ireland. The committee may wish to seek witnesses who could speak to it That kind of facility, if it can be developed successfully, is actually even better than the depleted gas field type storage because it can be developed incrementally. We can develop it in separate caverns of fixed sizes so it is much easier to manage and the investment is over a more extended period. There is an existing pipeline connecting Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that is very little used. It is currently operating only in the northward direction. It could be repurposed for that. Most important, that form of salt cavern storage is eminently suitable for hydrogen storage also and there are demonstrations in other locations in the world. It would be strategic in the sense of having the possibility of repurposing for hydrogen.

This is not the sort of thing where we can do a scientific analysis or even a close economic analysis. Until we invest a certain amount of money to characterise things we do not really know how much more it is going to cost. That is exactly the situation in which a state entity in balancing state-level risks has to make a decision to make investments, not because we have a balance sheet that shows it is the optimal thing to do but because we are mitigating against very high-impact events. If the committee is asking me where I come down, with that portfolio I come down on the side of promoting storage. If we determine that increased mitigation of risk is merited, storage in gaseous form should be of higher priority for us than going down the LNG route. The LNG route sounds simpler and more tractable and in some technical ways it is simpler and more tractable. However, it is not strategic for us and it is vulnerable to other risks. They are very small risks but if there is geopolitical risk of an attack on our interconnector infrastructure or on LNG import infrastructure, then domestic gaseous storage would be able to mitigate that risk as well. We are weighing up all these things in a very complicated and somewhat subjective way. I hope that helps.