Having moved to Sir Benfro from Swansea I already knew about the Mount Estate as it seems to have a poor rap in the County, as indeed some parts of Swansea do or anywhere else for that matter. A BBC documentary a few years back highlighted the high unemployment and social issues on the estate, which is mainly council stock, and in typical sycophantic fashion, couldn't resist squeezing in a plug about "Will and Kate's" Royal Wedding just to show how enthusiastic her Maj's poor but loyal Subjects are for their feudal overlords. But I wonder how many residents on the Mount could really give two hoots about the Royals who might as well live on another planet.
In any case I knew about the Mount for different reasons, as a few years prior to that documentary I was involved in protests to do with the LNG plants in Milford Haven, protests in which the Mount had a curious role.
Now of course ten years down the line South Hook and Dragon LNG are thoroughly embedded in the community and a big part of their PR drive is "getting down with the yoof"; a recent press release highlights the support South Hook have given to a youth club on the Mount. Great kudos for South Hook you might think, but peanuts given that the Mount, in point of fact, is sitting on a taxable goldmine worth millions of pounds per annum, not just to Pembs, but Wales as a whole.
Many of the kids attending the club will be too young to remember that relations between the community - in the form of the Mount Community Association - and the titans of LNG were not always so peachy. While the Terminal operators have gone to great lengths to ingratiate themselves with the local community, the Terminals were simply the most obvious part of an even bigger project designed to plug the UK's growing energy gap. The other key part - the giant pipeline - is buried a metre underground and runs for a length of 316 km to it's final destination in Gloucestershire.
But 13 years ago, residents in the Mount woke up to find that National Grid - who were responsible for the pipeline - had ploughed a swathe of destruction through a section of woodland managed by the community. I can still quite clearly recall speaking to one of the Association members on the phone - considering the reported outrage he was curiously reluctant to talk and it soon became clear why - the Association had been made to sign a gagging clause, in exchange for "compensation" for all the trouble. Having silenced protesters and dissenters through bribery and bully-boy tactics all along the pipeline route National Grid got their pipe in and within a few years it was all forgotten about.
But here's why it's worth refreshing our memories.
Having squished all dissent, the Terminals came into operation in 2009. And then a curious thing happened. The next year the Tories got back into power (Labour were the architects of the LNG project), and having done so promptly abolished Import VAT on gas imports in their emergency budget of June 22nd, 2010. This change included Import VAT on Liquefied Natural Gas.
Now, LNG hasn't lived up to the hype or hysteria and in fact the Terminals have been significantly under-utilised since they came into operation, but it's still worth doing the math. The UK government in fact very helpfully compiles statistics on gas imports for each individual LNG Terminal in the UK, including South Hook and Dragon. These stats allow us to calculate the amount of revenue that has been lost. So for example in 2017, South Hook imported 52,808 Gigawatt Hours worth of gas which was then pumped into the UK's national gas transmission system. The UK now has a free-market in gas, and the value of gas on the wholesale market is calculated on a kind of virtual gas trading exchange known as the "National Balancing Point" . Not surprisingly, demand is higher in the winter which is the point at which LNG tankers roving the high seas alter course and head for the UK to cut a tidy profit.
So based on the average price of gas on the UK wholesale market in 2017, around £160 million of lost taxable revenue docked at Milford Haven and bypassed a council estate with around 70% unemployment, on it's way to the big centres of demand in the rest of the UK. For 2018, that figure increases to around £200 million. Currently, the Terminals are significantly under-utilised as the UK makes up a lot of it's shortfall in gas from Norway (UK North Sea reserves peaked and have been declining since 2001), but Norwegian gas production is projected to decline shortly which means that LNG will become a bigger part of the equation as the years go by. The South Hook and Dragon LNG terminals have a minimum 25 year lifespan and have the capacity to meet up to 30% of UK gas demand. So the figures laid out above are only going one way: up.
To those of us concerned with the economics of Welsh Independence, these figures matter. Consider for example that the entire deficit for the Hywel Dda Health Trust, which covers the whole of west Wales, is £69 million, a figure which could effectively be wiped out, with quite a bit of spare change. Hywel Dda of course proposes to downgrade Withybush Hospital's A&E department, and many people in Pembrokeshire justifiably ask why their A&E is being downgraded when they have heavy industries with all the attendant safety risks. Heavy industries that include LNG. If Pembrokeshire shoulders the risks, it should also be able to reap the rewards. Rewards it could capture - as part of an Independent Wales.
Pembrokeshire is a proud and independent county, but sitting on the western extremity of Britain, many residents justifiably feel marginalised both by Cardiff and London. I would argue that they are only marginalised because they vote for Unionist Parties and a corrupt Westminster establishment and it's little doggie in Cardiff. Take them out of the equation and those LNG tankers show us what Pembrokeshire really is; Wales' gateway to the rest of the world. A world that we are perfectly capable of taking our place in.
The figures are there, and the choice is ours. Let's take it.
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