The residents of the picturesque North Yorkshire village of Thornton-le-Dale have sour-gas indigestion. Moorland Energy, a two-year-old UK gas developer, wants to build a gas plant that locals say will ruin the view. Moreover, they are worried about health and safety implications and are sceptical of the company's insistence their concerns are misplaced. "The design of the processing facility began by taking safety seriously," said Lawrie Erasmus, the chief executive of Moorland. "As far as I'm concerned, safety has no compromise."
Moorland, based in Guildford in southern England, says sour gas is already pumped from wells in Yorkshire's Ryedale area. The difference is that Moorland wants to detoxify its gas to make it safe for residential and commercial users. Other producers supply untreated gas for burning in power plants. Moorland was not allowed to build a gas plant in the national park where it drilled its inaugural well. So it settled on a site in a valley that Thornton overlooks.
Gordon Bell, a member of the protest group AGHAST (Against Having Sour Gas in Thornton), said authorities would rule on the application within weeks. Meanwhile, the UK Health and Safety Executive had told AGHAST the development had "no precedent anywhere in the UK". Moorland's safety report and other regulatory submissions lack any estimate of the concentration of poisonous hydrogen sulphide in its gas. The documents also fail to spell out the extreme toxicity of hydrogen sulphide, which causes the second-highest number of work-place fatalities in the oil and gas sector after helicopter accidents.
Mr Erasmus said the company's two-day well test was too brief for accurate determination of gas composition. The preliminary results for hydrogen sulphide were lower than expected and were likely to be revised, he added. tcarlisle@thenational.ae