Prime Minister Joseph Muscat will this week travel to Singapore to view the conversion job being carried out on the LNG storage vessel to be used at the new gas-fired power station in Delimara.

Earlier this week, Dr Muscat again refused to give a new timeline for the power station. However, he told journalists that progress was being made and that “there will soon be a big media event” to showcase it all.

This newspaper is informed that Dr Muscat, Minister Without Portfolio Konrad Mizzi and Chief of Staff Keith Schembri will visit the Keppel Shipyard in Singapore to witness the final works on the vessel’s conversion into a floating storage unit for Liquified Natural Gas.

In April, when Dr Muscat took over the energy portfolio from Dr Mizzi following the Panama Papers scandal, he said he was going to be given a brief on the state of the project and issue new deadlines. However, despite several questions from this newspaper, Dr Muscat has not provided them.

Originally, the vessel, which will feed LNG into a regasification unit in Delimara, was meant to have been in Malta by March 2015. A second deadline was then set for June 2016. Sources say that since this deadline has also been missed, the government is insisting with private consortium Electrogas, which owns the gas-fired power plant at Delimara, that some sort of “visual announcement” needs to be made. 

It is not yet known whether the money to be spent on this media event will be paid by taxpayers, or if Dr Muscat and his entourage will be hosted by Electrogas, Bumi Armada – the owner of the vessel – or Keppel shipyard, where the conversion is taking place.

As soon as the vessel’s €125 million conversion job is ready – now projected to coincide with Dr Muscat’s visit – it will set off for Malta to be permanently moored to a pier being constructed adjacent to the new plant. Testing will then have to start and continue until all health and safety checks are given the green light.

The floating storage unit is an LNG carrier built in 1985, named the Wakabu Maru and sold to Malaysia’s Bumi Armada by Japan’s Mitsui OSK lines. It is now named Armada LNG Mediterrana.

The Malaysian company won the contract from Electrogas to supply, operate and maintain the vessel for the Malta project for the next 18 years.

Enemalta has already entered into an agreement with Electrogas to buy all the electricity produced by its new plant for undisclosed rates for the next 18 years.

So far, the government has refused to publish the contracts.

ivan.camilleri@timesofmalta.com

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