IN the Murco site we see a multi-billion pound investment standing idle, one which has everything necessary for a major energy business, including a rail connection. Perhaps more importantly, the former workforce represents a human investment of many thousands of years: men and women who built up the skills to operate a highly complex processing facility.

In employment and in economic terms, it isn’t enough that Murco should just operate as a tank farm: that’s like the Cardiff Millennium Stadium being only used for Sunday League fixtures.

So: what to do with Murco, given that it can’t compete as a petroleum refinery – and, in any case, we now need to look beyond fossil fuels for the sake of future generations?

Friends of the Earth Pembrokeshire have already proposed that Murco should become a major solar- and wind energy generation complex, to which nobody could object on aesthetic grounds.

Furthermore, sustainable energy production could be an adjunct to tank farm operations: two lots of jobs, two income streams.

There are further possibilities.

The site could become a bio-refinery, producing the oils and chemicals we all need from plant matter rather than petroleum.

Welsh-grown crops could be brought in by the best combination of short sea voyages, rail transport and road haulage; products could be exported using existing underground pipelines. Result: yet more jobs, yet more income, plus farm diversification opportunities.

A truly visionary plan for Murco sees it become, additionally, a centre for researching and developing “green carbon” fuels – and this is no hippy dream, but a reality into which the Audi car company is already investing heavily.

The principle is simple: renewable electricity is used, by combining electrolysis and synthesis, to produce hydrogen, then methane, then other hydrocarbons.

Firstly we get a way of storing electrical energy; then we produce natural gas and liquid fuels which have no global warming penalty.

In reality, the technology needs much more time and money invested – but surely it’s better for a Pembrokeshire workforce to pursue this goal, collaborating with centres of excellence across the world, than let our UK government throw at least twenty, perhaps thirty, maybe forty billion pounds at the French and Chinese so they can, after years of delay, dump two nuclear power stations at Hinckley Point, right opposite Cardiff ?

I call on the Welsh Assembly to research the ideas outlined above – looking beyond the short term, evaluating all the “spin-off ”

benefits, remembering that the ultimate prize could be “home grown” zero-emission hydrocarbon fuels for Britain.

Meanwhile, because we burn mostly foreign fossil fuels, energy imports are damaging the UK balance of payments to the tune of £19.3 billion pa, and rising – and, of course, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels keep soaring.

CHRISTOPHER JESSOP

Independent Energy Consultant

Marloes