Orimulsion for Pembroke scrapped

National Power has scrapped its plans to burn the bitumen-based oil substitute Orimulsion at its Pembrokeshire power station, finally abandoning the £450-million project to convert the station and build docking facilities. The decision spells victory for environmentalists, who have battled against the project for six years.

According to National Power, the decision was scrapped because persistent delays in planning permission had rendered the project uneconomic. The final straw was a public enquiry, announced in June at the behest of local residents. This, the company says, would have taken two years. The conversion work has already been underway for three years, and would have taken another three years to complete if the inquiry allowed work to continue. This eight-year wait, explains National Power, was too long to justify the project's continuation.

Pembroke was originally designed to burn oil, and has been mothballed for may years. Despite Orimulsion's reputation as `the world's dirtiest fuel' - used as the cornerstone of the campaign by Friends of the Earth, who attested that it would release unacceptable levels of particulates into the atmosphere - National Power claims that its modifications to the plant would have made it cleaner than any coal-fired station. But the environmentalists shifted the battle onto another front, opposing the building of the landing jetty because the emulsified nature of the fuel would have made spills extremely difficult to clear up, as Orimulsion would have mixed with the water, not floated on top of it.