West

National Grid is laying nearly 200 miles of pipeline across England and Wales.

It’s a massive engineering task that will cost £840 million.

Project Manager David Mercer says it’s needed to bring in imported gas as our own supplies dwindle.

He says: "By 2010 the UK will need to import some 50% of its gas requirements and that rises to 80% by 2015."

Gas controversy

Liquid Natural Gas will be imported from places like the Middle East via the Welsh port of Milford Haven.

It will then be converted into natural gas and piped at very high pressure along the new pipeline.

But the project has been dogged by protests from the beginning.

In Wales, along the route of the pipeline, people came out in force to object.

Some even chained themselves to the trees.

The protestors managed to hold up work on some stretches of the pipeline until they were evicted.

Nearly two years after work began, the pipe has finally reached Tirley in Gloucestershire, but it’s bringing with it new controversy.

There are no protestors up the trees in Gloucestershire but the locals are equally determined to fight National Grid on the latest development - not the pipe itself,  but what’s planned at the end of it – a six acre gas plant on a green field site near the villages of Tirley and Corse. 

The new pipe will need to be connected to existing smaller pipes which operate at a lower pressure.

To connect the two, National Grid want to build a Pressure Reduction Installation or PRI.

As well as objecting to the location chosen for the installation, the protest group - Campaign against the PRI - is concerned the plant could become a target for terrorists.

The plant will handle 20 per cent of the country’s gas supplies and they feel it could be vulnerable to attack.  

Local resident and chairman of the campaign group Peter McMurtie says: "Nobody can give a guarantee that this will never be a target for terrorist activity.

"We can't say it will be, National Grid can't say it won't be. Nobody knows. It's unmanned, so you could lob a bomb over the fence and get away in your car."

The campaigners point to a trial at the Old Bailey earlier in 2007.

One of the five men convicted for the fertiliser bomb plots had worked for a contractor to the gas company Transco.

He had stolen CD Roms showing details of the high pressure gas network.

MI5 recorded two of the other men discussing a possible attack on the utilities.

In response to criticism, the National Grid Project Manager David Mercer says: "We work very closely with the government and the government's security services to make sure that our key installations are properly protected.

"Now you'll appreciate I can't really add to that but we have a very good system that we operate with the government's security services on this matter."    

Following over 1,600 letters of objection to the Forest of Dean District Council, plans for the PRI were turned down.

National Grid has appealed and now everybody is waiting for the result of a public inquiry due any day.

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