This is the second Bill I will discuss this week which will act to tear holes in our country's climate ambition. It is doing that on a week when we are seeing the realities of the scale of climate change across Europe, with heat impacting on so many countries and making life intolerable for millions of people. The irony of this is lost on the Government, which is rushing through this legislation and the airport cap legislation with the minimum of debate. I will focus on that before I get into the substantive discussion.
I have heard other Deputies eloquently advocate for this legislation. There are clear, different approaches and views in this regard, and that is fine. However, if that is the case, let us test it. This Bill and the Dublin Airport cap Bill will be discussed on Committee, Report and Remaining Stages for two hours each next week. I cannot recall seeing such important legislation rammed through this House with such little respect. I have put a set of amendments down on each of these Bills and other members of the Opposition have done likewise. There is a difference in approach between the Government and the Opposition. Let that be tested on Committee Stage. It could be done on Committee Stage next week. We all know what the end result will be, but this could be tested on Committee Stage next week and the Bill could then proceed to Report Stage the following week. It would still be done by the end of this year. It is deeply disrespectful, but also indicative of the lack of seriousness with which the Government treats these issues, that it is simply ramming this through the Dáil without the requisite opportunity to debate, amend or improve.
I will now turn to the legislation before us. My central issue with this Bill, the airport cap Bill and the Critical Infrastructure Bill is that all three seek a carve-out from the application of the climate action Act. With regard to this Bill, to be clear, no proposal to introduce new fossil fuel infrastructure into our country's energy mix should go ahead without a climate impact assessment.
That is exactly what section 33 of this Bill proposes to do. If an emergency reserve is needed, and it is a big "if", that "if" will be contingent on several factors. It will be contingent on how soon and how readily we can electrify our energy systems and support it with interconnection and support it with storage. Then it is critically important that a Bill that enables such a piece of infrastructure would take place within the framework of decarbonising our society. To do otherwise would create a situation where we develop a reserve which locks us in to further fossil fuel dependency well past its sale-by date. That, in my view, is what this proposal will do.
Every member of the Government who spoke on this said this is only for an emergency. If the Government is serious about that, let it help us achieve that by putting the relevant measures into this Bill, make sure it is time-bound and make sure it is compliant with our larger climate obligations in the Act and in the annual climate action plans. That is what would at least provide some element of reassurance that this is only emergency legislation. That could be done. I will be bringing forward amendments to allow that - other members of the Opposition will be doing the same - although they will not be accepted. That is why it is hard to hear this tale being spun that we are all in it together. There are two distinct views here about what this Bill could achieve and we will not even get the opportunity to tease that out over the next week.
Exempting fossil fuel infrastructure from the application of the climate Act sets a worrying precedent. It also makes a mockery of the efforts taking place all over the country, in households and in businesses in wide-ranging sectors of the economy, to reduce our emissions. What is happening with this legislation, taken in conjunction with the Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026 passed by the Houses, is the Government is creating a situation where our climate targets will undergo death by a thousand exemptions. Let us remember that where we exempt sections of society or the economy from the application of the Act, other sections of society have to meet the difference in terms of emissions. Therefore, we are pushing the burden onto households, small businesses and other parts of the economy.
We are exempting this liquefied natural gas, LNG, terminal but for every other public body in Ireland, the commitment to national mitigation plans and to the adaptation frameworks and the transition objectives all are legally binding. They are not only guidelines; they are legally binding. That is what happened in the Act all of us, all parties represented here, voted for in 2021. Now we have a major fossil fuel project that has been planned to work outside of the country's climate law and that will inevitably lead to calls for other pieces of infrastructure to be excluded too. We see that with the airport cap and the Critical Infrastructure Bill.
If the climate law applies to everything except the most carbon intensive projects, essentially, it applies to nothing at all. That is what we are doing in the three pieces of legislation that will be passed in this House over these two months.
Without the right guardrails in place in this legislation, we are putting ourselves at risk of creating significant fossil fuel lock-in within our energy system and doubling down on a higher cost of fuel for families and for homes. LNG terminals do not store LNG for long periods of time. They have to be continually topped off because of the burn off of LNG, even when there is no emergency. This creates a continual demand for the LNG gas in the energy system, sending the exact opposite message to what we should be sending right now.
We know that long-term use of fossil fuels is incompatible with our 2050 targets, which should take priority. Even if the terminal is built for security today, and let us not forget it will not be built today but will be operational in 2030 at the earliest, the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, has recognised that LNG terminals will have to be phased out within ten-to-15 years. Then we will have this terminal as a stranded asset. It will become unusable and uneconomic. I note that this Bill does not require the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU, to have a clear pathway to wind down and decommission the reserve while approving it, and that only adds to those risks.
If we are to have a gas reserve, it should entail the smallest possible amount for the shortest possible period of time with a clear exit strategy, all of which is underpinned by the mechanisms of the climate Act. The Bill we are debating today does none of those things. Instead, it leaves the use of LNG in our energy system as an open-ended question at a time when we know just how unreliable supplies of fossil fuels can be globally.
I will turn to that point of security of supply because that has been the central argument that the Government has put forward. I believe tying ourselves into LNG will do the opposite of providing security of energy supply in our country. We know that using LNG fails to deliver affordability. We saw the first day of the Iran war, the price of LNG shot up 46% in one single day. The world's largest LNG terminal, Ras Laffan, in Qatar, was closed on day two of the Iran conflict. Twenty per cent of the world's LNG comes from there. Much of the rest of the LNG comes from the United States, with all the risks of being dependent on the whims of the Trump Administration and whoever follows him. We are tying our economy into a substance, a highly-polluting fossil fuel, that is unstable as to both its price and its availability. That is not energy security. What will deliver energy security for Ireland is producing our own renewable energy here at home and that should be our priority. That should be where the Government is fixing its time and where the Government is fixing the huge economic resources - €900 million - that this particular project will cost.
We should not be relying on other countries to produce our energy for us, such as using Qatari LNG or US fracked gas. We need our own energy so that we can make our own choices. The solution is to rapidly build onshore and offshore wind, develop our solar farms, put in place the energy interconnection systems that will tie us into other grids and ensure the energy we create here at times of high production from renewables is stored through rolling out battery storage at scale, and I raised this issue with the Taoiseach earlier this week.
When my party was in government, as part of the Government, we put in place the frameworks that would enable the roll-out of offshore wind. We went from a situation where there was only a skeleton crew of staff working in the Department of energy on the issue of offshore to creating a new offshore wind unit in the Department. We brought together a task force, bringing in industry so that it could engage with the Department in terms of the barriers that existed there. As part of that Government, we worked with Ministers in other Departments to set up Marine Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, to get the marine planning legislation passed. That Government was able to advance five major renewable energy auctions in 2023. Three years on, there is still not one of those feeding into the grid. At the same time, every time wind energy industry representatives comes into this House and talk to TDs, they say An Coimisiún Pleanála does not have enough staff to get the planning applications done in detail. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, will stand up and say that he doubled the number of staff in An Coimisiún Pleanála and he is not giving any more. That is the barrier the industry experts have cited to us in getting our offshore wind energy system online. The barriers are lack of staff in An Coimisiún Pleanála to undertake this scrutiny. It is not judicial reviews. It is not the climate Act. It is not environmental NGOs. It is a failure to address the substantive barriers to the delivery of offshore wind and of the wider electrification of our energy systems.
The Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, and I have spoken already about something small that will not change the world. In plug-in solar, even something small such as that, Ireland is behind because there is not that effort to bring those concerned, whether ESB Networks, EirGrid and the Irish standards authority, together to bring about a solution to allow more people enjoy lower cost energy from these solutions.
The Celtic interconnector, something that will guarantee significant energy security and enough electricity to support 450,000 households, is delayed by two years. These are the areas where the Government needs to focus. Instead, we have a grandiose project such as this.
We have Members on the backbenches touting nuclear fuel. We need to focus on the areas where we can actually deliver and have a track record but where there are clear barriers to the rapid delivery of the electrification of our energy networks. I wish the same passion and determination were put into the changes that would allow us to create our own energy in Ireland as have been put into driving forward this Bill and other Bills that undermine our climate obligations.
I will talk a little about the project itself because it is not going to deliver energy security in the short term. The best estimate we got in the committee was that it would take three and a half years - until 2030 - before this would be built, assuming there are no delays. There are few projects in this country where we can see that happening. It is going to cost €900 million in capital and running costs. This huge investment would pay for many of the solar panels Deputy Neville said he would love to see going up across the country.
We have to remember that by the time the terminal is open, climate targets will be higher, our carbon budget will be far more constrained and our reliance on fossil fuels should be declining, not growing. However, through this Bill and the facility that will be created under it, we will lock ourselves even further into a continued fossil fuel reliance, which could last for decades. This is completely misaligned with the climate goals the country agreed to. We should not be planning further fossil fuel energy infrastructure at the same time as we are trying to move away from fossil fuels as a core national policy. This creates a real risk that when this terminal is created, our energy goals and climate policies will have moved on. By 2030 and 2031, we will be in a different place. Hopefully, some of that wind power will be feeding into our system, but we will have invested €900 million in this infrastructure.
To take the example of Germany, in 2022, it invested €2.5 billion in LNG infrastructure. Since then, it has had to spend more than €4 billion extra in state aid to cover the losses, as these terminals' operating costs continue to rise. These rising costs can be attributed to Germany's decreased reliance on natural gas since the terminals were built. That question of having a stranded asset is not one that has been examined in sufficient detail. In years to come, there will be real questions raised about the wisdom of investing so much in a large piece of expensive infrastructure when our national policy is that we do not want to use this fuel any more.
This Bill is a clear effort to undermine and weaken our climate law, in combination with the other three Bills I referred to earlier. I passionately believe in energy security for this country. I remember my parents talking to me about the late 1970s and the oil crisis in that period. Four times in my time in Dáil Éireann, our country has been struck by dramatic energy security incidents, generated by the wars in Ukraine and Iran. Those energy crises have impacted on families and caused misery and financial hardship all over the country. I passionately believe in delivering security of supply, but I am not convinced by the argument the Government is bringing forward. Tying ourselves to a polluting fossil fuel that has seen its price spike and its availability shrink in each of these energy fuel crises is not the solution to our security of supply. Security of supply for energy in Ireland is delivered by making our own renewable energy here in Ireland. That is where the focus of this Government's action, legislation and investment needs to be. Very importantly, the Minister and his civil servants, in creating policy, need to focus on getting through the blockages in our system. The industry groups supporting the electrification of our nation's energy systems are trying to get through those blockages. However, they are not getting help because the focus is on work like such as this, namely, legislation that requires a huge amount of work and is locking us into a system and energy source we need to move away from.
I look forward to the opportunity to tease out in detail my objections and the objections of others to the Bill. I look forward to bringing forward meaningful solutions to some of the issues I have raised. I appeal to the Minister of State to speak to his colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, about the time allocated to this Bill. It is not acceptable to have two hours for Committee, Report and Remaining stages. It does not do his or any of our arguments justice. This is an important matter, and it deserves more than two hours.
