Sinn Féin MLA Phil Flanagan has called for the Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster to accept the reality that natural gas is not a sustainable energy source and to bring forward a statutory definition of sustainable energy that does not include any fossil fuels.

Mr Flanagan, who is Sinn Féin's spokesperson on Energy and the Deputy Chair of the Assembly’s Enterprise, Trade & Investment Committee, said: "Arlene Foster's definition of sustainable energy is not sustainable; nowhere else in the developed world would natural gas be defined as sustainable.

-- Advertisement --

"In essence, sustainable means that something can be used, but remain at its current level; but as we all know, fossil fuels are a depleting resource and will run out if we continue to consume them at the current rate.

"New fossil fuel resources will not just form themselves in a decade or a generation. As most of us accept, it takes millions of years for fossil fuels to form.

"But for a party in which so many of its membership think that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, this nonsense probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

"There is no logic in determining natural gas to be a sustainable energy source, even if the Minister seems deluded into thinking that it is low in carbon intensity."

(CD)