The judicial review due to take place this week into the proposed Larne gas caverns should finally provide some objective clarity on the project.
This is the first time the courts in Northern Ireland have had to consider such a complicated environmental and economic argument - the judge is being asked to weigh energy security against climate change.
Objective conclusions have so far been in short supply, certainly to the casual observer.
Harland and Wolff owns Islandmagee Energy Limited (IMEL), responsible for the gas storage scheme. It is no insult to say the company can hardly be counted on for a ruthlessly critical analysis.
Approval has been granted by the planning and environmental authorities at Stormont, which is not the recommendation it might be, to put it mildly. They have managed to overlook, exacerbate, then wilfully ignore some of the worst ammonia pollution in Europe, caused by agriculture. What else might they miss?
The seven caverns will be excavated by hosing out spaces in a salt deposit, producing highly salty water. This is the crux of local environmental objections. IMEL makes the apparently common-sense point that salt water should dilute harmlessly into the sea. The company has environmental impact studies and a hydrodynamic modelling report to prove it, showing the salty water will “rapidly disperse” in currents around the outflow pipe, half a kilometre offshore.
However, people will be understandably sceptical of such reports, given how the impact of waste-water from mining has sometimes been downplayed.
Then there are the unknown unknowns. Mysterious die-offs of crabs and lobsters along the north-east coast of England have been blamed by some scientists on dredging for the new Teesside freeport, disturbing sediment polluted by decades of heavy industry. Other scientists disagree. Larne has its own history of industrial pollution, although on a smaller scale. What might disturbing its sea-bed stir up?
Environmental campaigns are no more objective a source than industry and government. Friends of the Earth, which is bringing the judicial review along with local campaign group No Gas Caverns, is also currently objecting to the conversion of Kilroot power station from coal to gas. No fossil fuel project is acceptable, it seems, even as a significant improvement during the transition to fully renewable energy.
The same absolutism is in evidence over the gas caverns, which Friends of the Earth objects to as “fossil fuel infrastructure” on “the wrong side of history”.
IMEL has been trying to counter this by claiming the caverns can be converted to storing hydrogen from renewable sources. Friends of the Earth says even if that worked it would be very inefficient - so the perfect must once again prevent the good. Is industrial society supposed to jump straight to net zero without any interim steps?
Friends of the Earth is at least up front about its ideology. Other green groups are not always as honest. The environmental objection to incinerators, for example, is that they create a demand for waste that disincentivises recycling. This is rather complicated and theoretical, so many campaigns simply claim waste incinerators poison people, although such plants have operated safely for half a century.
The campaign against the gas caverns has been relatively free of cynical health scares, which is progress in this type of debate. Gas storage in salt deposits is a proven technology, used safely around the world for over 60 years. There are mutterings the caverns will be as tall as skyscrapers, yet they will be beneath almost a mile of solid rock. Local campaigners are focusing instead on the danger to marine life if the salty water used for excavation settles on the seabed or the floor of Larne Lough.
Relying on the media for further illumination would be optimistic.
The No Gas Caverns campaign has a genius for a photo opportunity, with its members holding ‘protest swims’ by running into the sea at Brown’s Bay. You will see this on air and in print more often than you will see a mathematician questioned on the outflow hydrodynamic report, for obvious reasons. The cliché that journalists are arts graduates who recoil from technical stories is sadly too close to the truth.
There would be a ready media market for ‘Acquaintances of the Earth’: a dependably objective environmental campaign, able to run a sceptical eye over green absolutism and not innately hostile to industrial society. But that would be anathema to activists. A judge’s ruling is the best insight we can hope for - until the inevitable appeal, of course.
