"The disruption that took place in September very nearly caused serious damage to our economy," Jack Straw, the home secretary, told Parliament today as he listed moves the authorities planned to take to avoid further disruption of fuel supplies, including using troops to drive delivery tankers "as a last resort".
Delivery tankers were held up after about 100 protesters started to blockade the site on Thursday.
The first deliveries, by tanker, are expected in 2018.
There are currently just four public refuelling stations in the UK, in locations including Hendon, Heathrow, Swindon, that rely on hydrogen deliveries by tankers.
Ineos, the petrochemical company founded and chaired by a billionaire, Jim Ratcliffe, will take delivery of a tanker full of ethane at its Grangemouth plant in Scotland on Tuesday, marking the first fruit of a $2bn investment.
We've just had a tanker delivery and we need it.
Maersk successfully completed the first-ever drone delivery to a tanker off the coast of Denmark this year, pushing the focus to reducing costs for shipping, inspections and delivery.
It takes two days for a tanker delivery to arrive so we're hoping supplies will last until the next one.
The company acknowledges that the protest could slow delivery of the tankers, which are needed to begin replacing a nearly 50-year-old fleet of cold-war-era refuelers.
The drawbacks were two or three security-cordoned tanker deliveries a week to a permanently moored ship nine miles from Long Island in the eastern Sound, and trenching for a 21.7-mile underwater pipeline to tie into the existing Iroquois pipeline between the two states.
