Shell and its partners this week began piping gas from the offshore Corrib field to an inland terminal after gaining final consent on Tuesday from Ireland’s Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. The Corrib gas field, one of four commercial gas finds in Ireland’s history, was found by Enterprise Oil PLC in 1996 in the Atlantic Ocean about 83 kilometers (52 miles) off the coast of rural County Mayo. Shell acquired Enterprise in 2002 , but the Anglo-Dutch firm’s plans to build an onshore pipeline to transport the Corrib field’s gas to a terminal it would construct at Bellanaboy in County Mayo met with fierce local opposition. That resistance focused on concerns about the safety of the pipeline and its effects on the environment. It led to changes to the pipeline’s path, including routing it through a 4.9 kilometer (3 miles long) tunnel, the longest in Ireland, that […]