For a stroll in Marsaxlokk
Marsaxlokk residents must be more than satisfied that embellishment works at the promenade are finally over. The business community must be positive that the dust and inconvenience is now gone. No more days of discontent at the fishing village and...
Marsaxlokk residents must be more than satisfied that embellishment works at the promenade are finally over. The business community must be positive that the dust and inconvenience is now gone. No more days of discontent at the fishing village and there is no question about it: the south is a beautiful place.
On the promenade there is a moment’s distraction from the imposing 150-metre high chimney stack at Delimara as water spouts from the fountain that has just been installed as part of the embellishment. The beautiful south is also industrial. It houses the nation’s vital energy infrastructure, which, in turn, sustains the economy; no energy, no economy. Thoughts on Marsaxlokk promenade are about what the future may hold for the bay but, most of all, the village, given what lies ahead for Delimara.
Who would have guessed what the future held for the peninsula in the deep south when, back in 1988, on that same promenade, a fiery Dom Mintoff rallied the crowd in protest to the power station development? For the record, the reports on site identification collated by the government as Volume 1 For The 1988 Delimara Power Station project carries a letter from Preece, Cardew and Rider of April 11, 1968 in which Irdum il-Bies is identified as a possible power station site with a tunnel to carry the station circulating water right through Delimara into Il-Ħofra ż-Żgħira. The former is the site where the Delimara power station as we know it now stands.
The quasi tragic tribal-politics controversy that surrounded the 1988 Delimara power station project triggered the first initiative towards the environmental assessment process in Malta. Emotions ran high as there seemed to be no end to the debate on alternative sites. The crux of it all stood in the fact that no new power station site alternative in the south of the island could be considered in isolation from runway 14/32 given the inevitable implications of chimney stack height on aircraft landing and take-off.
Risk analysis by the UK Civil Aviation Authority to assess the implications for aviation for alternative sites had distilled the statistic that, basing on aviation traffic levels forecast for the year 2000, the risk of an aircraft accident at a potential site in Bengħajsa was estimated at about 1 in 2,000 with an offset of two kilometres from centreline implying a reduction in accident risk probability by two or three orders of magnitude.
The site at Delimara where the power station was eventually built was therefore judged a 100 to 1,000 times safer than Bengħajsa with respect to aviation considerations.
In a separate analysis to assess air quality implications it was considered that Delimara Point was the most suitable site when taking into account the air pollution impacts parameter alone.
Convoluted as it may be, history does have a tendency to repeat itself. More than 20 years down the line, Delimara continues to fuel an agenda mixed with controversy on the use of heavy fuel oil in the age of clean energy and renewables, the fate of containers with hazardous waste, BWSC and the contracts that have been questioned. It is never quiet on the front facing the Marsaxlokk promenade. Perhaps, even before the power station extension shall ever start to operate on cleaner natural gas, there seems to be a waste-to-energy project in the pipeline. Waste is a resource; waste is energy. But the burden to manage it correctly is undoubtedly huge.
It is required that the Delimara power station be extended as part of a major overhaul in Malta’s power generation system. This overhaul entails the long-promised and awaited decommissioning of the Marsa power station that has been running since 1966 while connecting Malta’s power grid with Sicily, coupled to a further drive towards renewables and a responsible shorter- or longer-term switch to natural gas. The new power station extension shall house state-of-the-art pollution abatement technology for the purposes of flue gas desulphurisation and denitrification.
The biggest of all future challenges for Malta’s energy sector perhaps derives from unexpected quarters – state-of-the-art waste incine-ration should enable us to generate electricity from the municipal waste we generate.
The challenge may not be with installing the technology per se; waste incineration is widespread in Europe and elsewhere. The bone of contention is whether the competent authorities in Malta shall be up to it to ensure that this technology shall operate in conformity with EU law at all times to safeguard the interests of human health and the environment, not least, passers-by on the Marsaxlokk promenade.
The Marsaxlokk promenade upgrade is obviously laudable. It fizzles into irrelevance in the wake of the challenges that lie ahead for the sustainable management of Delimara.
sapulis@gmail.com
The author specialises in environmental management.