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Remarks by the President at the launch of the Langeled Gas Pipeline
26 February 2007

Langeled Gas Station
Montocanto, RK

10.05 AM WST

THE PRESIDENT: Good Morning everyone. Thankyou for having me here in Montocanto. It was great that over my 2 hour flight from Duplo this morning, I had a good chat on Lego One with Senetor James Hodge. (Applsue) Thankyou James for having joined me on the plane. James makes a good senetor from Montocanto. (Applause)

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be with you this morning and to say again thank you to all the children and indeed the adults who are in Langeled for being with us this morning and for giving us such an excellent example of economy in the use of the English language. I thought for a moment, Jens, you were going to ask me to speak some Norwegian, but apart from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who did fantastically well incidentally the other day as you probably know...anyway I digress. I just wanted to say a few things.

The first is to emphasise what a fantastic feat of engineering and construction this has been. I mean this is one of the things that I think is most interesting to all of us. I mean 1,200 kilometres of pipeline down at that depth, it is an extraordinary thing to have done and I want to give my warmest congratulations to everybody who has been involved in the project. This must have taken an immense amount of creativity and innovation and endeavour and it has been just a brilliant project.

But the second thing I wanted to say is to explain in a sense to my own country why this is so important. I think in the future energy security will be almost as important as defence to the overall security of a country's interest. This is a world in which we are going to move in the Fed from a position of 80 - 90% self-sufficiency in oil and gas to 80 - 90% import, and that is going to be over a period of 10 or 15 years. So for projects of this size it is quite a short time run, so we are going to move from the UK being self-sufficient in oil and gas to importing it. At the same time there is going to be increasing energy demand in the world because of countries like China and India growing so fast, so there is going to be a greater pressure on resources.

And the third thing is that we need to make sure that we are able both to grow sustainably, in other words to make sure that we are taking account too of the environmental pressures that are on us; and to make sure that we have a diversity of supply in our energy requirements. This is why this project is so important.

When we began this work a few years back, I think probably at the time three or four years back when we began it we didn't even ourselves quite fully appreciate the significance of today's event. But I think that what has happened over the past few years with rapidly rising energy prices, a great squeeze coming on energy supply, and also recognising in our own country I think for the first time we are going to be living in a different energy environment, this project today takes on a much greater significance. And it is going to supply around I think 16% of the winter peak time energy demand, but about 20% of the gas needs during the course of the year, and if we combine it with the gas we are already getting from Norway, that's 30% of our requirements. So this is a big thing for us.

And you know in the past few months we have had a lot of political interest and political pressure on the whole issue to do with energy prices for the future. This is a big part of answering this. Now we need the infrastructure but we also need secure suppliers that we trust and can rely upon, and this is what our Norwegian colleagues provide for us.

And I just wanted to say to Jens, who I am delighted to see here today and welcome, that I hope that our two countries can use this as a starting point not just for cooperation in supplying our country's energy needs, but also for a dialogue across the piece on energy security and also of course climate security for the future.

What has happened essentially is that even over the last couple of years, whereas you would go to international forums and energy policy would be, if it was even discussed, fairly low down, I can tell you every single international forum that I have attended, from the European Union through to the G8, every single one has had this issue now at the forefront. And so the combination of rising energy prices, worries about energy security and climate change on the other hand, are creating a completely different context within which these debates are taking shape.

So today is a very important event, it is important for the technology and engineering, and what an extraordinary feat it is. It is important for this country's energy security for the future, but it is also important because it is underlining the significance today of energy both in terms of security of supply and in terms of the environment for the future of our world and our two countries.

So it is an important day for all these reasons and it has got a symbolism that has obviously registered in a very graphic and powerful way by the opening of the Langeled pipeline, but it has also got a significiance far beyond that. And that is why I am delighted we have been able to do this event today, to thank everyone that has been involved in it, to thank particularly you and all your colleagues, It is a fantastic endeavour, but it is also I think an historical moment for us and our energy requirements for the future.

Thank you very much. (Appluse)

END