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Comment by saltysalt | Hacker News Reader

A LNG terminal would help. Lots of bad infrastructure decisions have left us extremely exposed to those external shocks you mentioned.

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An LNG terminal would not help for the current high prices. Europe is experiencing a gas price shock precisely because LNG is easy to store and transport. Asia gets half it's gas through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently experiencing troubles. This means Asia is willing to pay a lot of premium for LNG, which in turn means that Europe has to match this premium otherwise LNG will go to Asia and not Europe.

Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.

Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.

American energy exports are turning around in the mid-atlantic to go somewhere else instead because Europe is getting outbid.

"My energy prices are high" because you are getting outbid. You can't stop getting outbid by building more transport infrastructure. That terminal will go unused.

An LNG terminal wouldn't help with cost (it would probably increase it a bit, if anything, as the cost of building it would have to be paid back). It's desirable from an energy _security_ perspective; as it is we are very dependent on a pipeline to Britain.

Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage.

Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.

A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.

Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.

As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.

Yeah, even though I voted (happily) for the Greens, I was very disappointed in them not building an LNG terminal, purely for energy security reasons. I'd be super happy if it never got used, but it's a cost worth paying just in case.

An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers.

> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers

This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.

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