The Prime Minister has this habit of misleading his audience to get away with his political blunders. His latest stunt is that it is safer to have the 140,000 cubic metres of hazardous cargo within Marsaxlokk bay than anchor the tanker offshore.

Who exactly does the Prime Minister want to fool with such senseless remarks and in the absence of robust independent studies to back him up? We have become accustomed to these antics, knowing full well that Joseph Muscat is more interested to listen to himself than to the residents who matter most.

As we have highlighted time and time again, this project lacks sound feasibility and option analyses, it is a project that is not backed up by a strong environmental impact statement, it lacks appropriate risk assessments, it is missing a marine impact assessment and, yet, Muscat wants us to believe that the risks would be higher if the tanker is berthed out at sea.

When the planning and permitting processes for a project of this proportion are corrupted, short-circuited and performed to merely get them out of the way, as opposed to an informed decision, confusion reigns.

Confusion is something that has really not gone amiss in this project. It will supply us with 200MW of electricity, the need for which has never been justified. It will increase our cost of electricity even though it is being disguised as a cheap alternative. It will help us rid ourselves of the ‘cancer factory’, which today we know is just a fallacy. It will render the pipeline option unfeasible because the land-based regasification unit will not be amortised without the tanker anchored for the full duration of the 18-year contract.

All of these excuses have been used by Muscat to justify the danger that this government wishes to subject the people of the south to.

Amid this confusion, unpublished risk reports and reports published only in summary, preliminary or draft format, huge discrepancies have been unearthed that cannot go unnoticed.

The head of the Occupation Health and Safety Authority is reported to have “rubbished fears that a natural gas cloud could ignite directly over Marsaxlokk” because “a gas cloud could not reach the inner harbour area and endanger residents’ lives as it would have found a source of ignition long before drifting across the port into the residential areas”. Wow!

The dispersion of odourless gas landward may have catastrophic consequences

Essentially, what is being said here is that any gas cloud will meet a source of ignition within a few minutes of a gas leak happening. This ignition will burn back the gas to its source, meaning the flames will not burn outwards to the residential areas but rather implode.

“Since the system shuts down within 30 seconds, the chances of the leaked gas continuing to escape are close to none.”

How good life would be if we were capable of predicting a course of events as accurately as OHSA has done in this respect. If we really were this good, fatalities resulting from accidents could easily be a thing of the past. Yet, OHSA should know that this is just one of the million permutations that may result as a consequence of the large mass of fuel stored near a power station.

OHSA should know that dispersion of gas in the form of a trailing cloud is evident from a number of small-scale experiments. Calculations with ignition probability increasing as the cloud drifts longer have also been published. Luckily, there is little evidence so far but the uncertainties are still very huge and, yet, OHSA simplifies this with just one potential simplistic scenario.

On the other hand, the head of OHSA overlooks a scenario excluded by their own consultant, George Papadakis, when this expert states that “Jet fires have not been examined in the present study since immediate ignition of releases is a remote probability assuming that the areas within the boundaries of the regasificationunit, the FSU location including loading/unloading, are ignition free (ATEX classified)”.

In other words, when there is a leak resulting from, for example, pressurised LNG in a pipeline, which cannot be withheld within the 30-second assumption mentioned earlier, the gas will not result in a jet fire because it is being assumed that the gas will not find an ignition source nearby. If there were, the repercussions have not been studied but they would undoubtedly be catastrophic.

A jet fire spreads outwards from a leak with very high velocities as the gas evaporates to a volume of 600 times from its liquid to its gaseous state, while it will violently burn in the turbulent, gaseous state mixed with air.

Therefore, for convenience sake, OHSA assumes an ignition source to be nearby when the gas leak may be controlled within 30 seconds or so but, in the same report, we do not assume any ignition source for leaks which cannot be controlled and abated within the 30 second parameter.

These uncertainties are uncalled for when the mass of hazardous cargo to be stored is so huge and when alternatives to the floating storage unit are tried and tested technologies already.

The Prime Minister has pledged his political survival to this project and in return he is jeopardising the livelihoods and well-being of the thousands of residents who do not wish to live, day-in-day-out, with the fear of the unknown right on their doorstep.

The dispersion of odourless gas landward may have catastrophic consequences and this when we all know that alternative solutions, not yet assessed by the government, may deliver better results for Malta and the south.

George Pullicino is a Nationalist MP.