The Curious Case Of The Minister And The Missing Safety Valve.

National Grid are happy as larry. Pipeline Tsar David Mercer claims today that their "tremendous engineering achievement" is now finally complete. As usual with National Grid, this claim is true, and then it's not true. A testament to Mercer's finely honed ability to twist and wriggle around the real issue, kind of like a worm on a sharp hook.

It may well be true that the pipeline is complete. The stations - without which the pipeline is useless - are another matter. They are far from complete. And when Malcolm Wicks happily flicked his safety valve at Felindre this afternoon, we can only hope that the safety valve in question was the same one that was raised by a Swansea councillor at a planning meeting at the end of last year.

At that farcical planning meeting, during which the Felindre Compressor Station was discussed and "approved", a local Labour Party councillor raised a concern about the amount of safety valves at the proposed station. This concern was based on observations made at a site visit 3 weeks previously. Exactly what was discussed on this site visit is hard to ascertain, as members of the public were excluded. The inference was that there may be a valve missing.

These valves, known in the industry as "block valves" work to isolate sections of pipeline in the event of a leak, or worse, a full blown rupture.

And while the good Councillor was concerned to clarify that there was a valve to protect the Swansea area, he inadvertedly touched on a larger issue. Many concerned residents have raised concerns about the number of safety valves along the pipeline. It's not hard to intuit that, given the length of the pipe and the tremendous pressure it operates at, there should be more than 2 valves along 314 kilometres of pipeline. This concern has never been adequately addressed.

A report commissioned by Ofgem at the end of 2005, for example, costed 2 safety valves along the 196 kilometre length of Phase 2. As it stands, there's only one, at Llanwrda. So what happened to the other one? At a cost of 250,000 quid apiece that's not even half of the cool 600,000 Chief Honcho Steve Holliday was paid last year.

With an estimated 120 tonnes of gas sitting in every mile-long stretch of pipeline, these valves are kind of important...

To put this issue in perspective, consider that Murphy pipelines, the contractor working on the eastern half of Phase 2, constructed another pipeline between Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland a few years ago. This smaller 112 km pipeline had no less than 5 valves along it's length, even though it was contracted to operate at a lower pressure.

This issue of safety valves, while it certainly perplexed Councillor Roger Smith (Clydach), didn't stop him doing what so many other Labour councillors have done over the last 4 years. Having queried a planning officer who had just told him that the Environment Statement was a "wonderful document" even though "he hadn't read it all" he went ahead and voted for the application anyway.

Go figure.