GREENPEACE has returned to do public-relations battle with Shell in Shetland waters two years after its effective, but ultimately botched, campaign to stop the company dumping the redundant Brent Spar oil storage buoy in the deep Atlantic.

This time, Jon Castle, the bearded English skipper known as Captain Greenpeace, is trying persuade Shell and BP not to use an oil storage ship the new Petrojarl Foinaven FPSO now anchored in 1,400ft of water on the edge of the continental shelf 100 miles west of the islands.

Shell has 28% of the Foinaven venture, due on stream in the next few weeks.

Greenpeace's UK boss, Lord Peter Melchett, says the oil companies and the Government should be putting their money into solar power and other renewables rather than Atlantic frontier oilfields like Foinaven, Schiehallion, Suilven and Clair.

The campaigners make the usual technical criticisms of the received environmental dangers ranging from whales deafened by seismic bangs to coastlines smeared with goo if the floater turns out to be less hunky-dory than BP and Shell say.

There is a certain amount of sympathy for this view in the islands, particularly among fishermen and bird-watchers. But the Save the Atlantic campaign is no longer just a technical argument. Its strategy is on a more fundamentalist, philosophical level. And here, Greenpeace may have made its biggest tactical mistake since it got its sums wrong on how much muck really was swilling around in the tanks of Brent Spar.

Swashbuckling

In the summer of 1995, Shetland council leaders waterfront businesses, fishermen and others welcomed Capt Castle and his swashbuckling crew when they made the port of Lerwick their forward base. This time, there is less enthusiasm. It's not that people disagree with the idea that we should stop using so much oil and start using more power from the wind, tides and solar panels - which work quite well even at Shetland's high latitude. They just can't see that it's a practical proposition to ask oil companies which have spent getting on for a billion pounds on Foinaven to say "Oh, sorry we made a mistake. We'll take our FPSO home again."

Shetland councillors are interested in green philosophy, but even more interested in keeping the oil spills from the doorstep. They have concentrated on wringing assurances out of the oil companies that every possible precaution has been taken to minimise the risk of pollution from Petrojarl Foinaven and the other floaters which will join her out there over the next few years.

Doubts remain among keen ornithologists, but the prevailing view in Shetland is that BP and its Norwegian contractor, Golar-Nor, really have tried to deliver.

On a recent visit to the Petrojarl Foinaven, I was impressed by the safety-consciousness of the staff on board. just to make sure the offcial line was true, I slipped my BP "minder" for a while and spoke directly to some workers on board. Their main complaint was lousy satellite TV reception. Even the toilet cleaners knew the safety regs. They also knew how near the technical frontier they were working. They told me of a terrifying storm in February, which halted hook-up work on the Foinaven risers and sent a 100ft wave crashing the length of the ship, damaging stanchions and railings underneath the helideck. For four days, the crew-change helicopter could not land on the violently heaving helideck. Others who have worked out there point out another problem - on the edge of the shelf, you frequently find wind, waves and current running in different directions. This is what causes the so-called "freak" waves which have made the area notorious among fishermen for generations.

Compromise

A floater's OIM has to decide whether to head into swell or sea. Often, it's a compromise. "She moves like a drunken rocking horse," was one comment I heard from a crewman.

When you have a broken bow-thruster, as Petrojarl Foinaven currently does, and it can't be fixed until a rare, flat calm day in midsummer, this is one more problem for the man on the bridge.

BP points out that, although the February storm was exceptionally severe, at no time was the strain on the 10 huge anchors and their cables more than 50% of design limits. It is confident that downtime due to weather will come in at about 7%.

AU Shetland can do now is take what the oilmen say on trust. The street demonstrations will not come unless the promises are broken. And, unlike the Brent Spar, Foinaven and the rest mean money and jobs for the islands. Not a lot in national terms, to be sure, but enough for councillors to temper their environmental worries with economic reality.

Without Schiehallion, due to start sending its weekly shuttle tanker to the Shetland oil port of Sullom Voe by the spring of 1999, a lot of oil-terminal workers would be looking for work elsewhere. Foinaven's shuttles are going to Flotta, in Orkney, but Schiehallion is a lifeline for the council-owned harbour in Shetland.

A deal signed at the New Year ensures continued employment for dozens of tugboat crewmen and shore workers into the new century. It also signals that Sullom Voe is very much in the running for 4 other shuttle work and for the big one-the long-waited Atlantic Frontier gathering pipeline, if and when that hugely expensive project gets under way.

Greenpeace has a point, of course. It really is a bit silly to spend all this money getting oil out from beneath the wildest part of the North Atlantic when we know renewable energy works; when there is so much oil that can be extracted at much lower cost elsewhere, and when every new oil well means more disturbance to the global atmosphere. It forgets the Netanyahu factor. Israel's current prime minister has ensured that lasting peace in the Middle East is a mirage.

Hostile

As long as large-scale hostilities remain on the agenda in that troubled region, the price of oil will remain relatively high and it will be worth the industry's while producing from the hostile Atlantic Frontier, and even from Iceberg Alley off the coast of Newfoundland, where the Hibernia field is nearing first production.

Capt Greenpeace was last heard of listening to whales on his hydrophone somewhere west of St Kilda, making notes of the wild things which live there before the seismic bangs from the 17th round of UK exploration licensing. I am not a betting man but, if I were, I would wager that he will soon be setting course for the Grand Banks-or Tel Aviv!