Last week the Prime Minister travelled to Singapore together with Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri for the delivery of the LNG carrier. Why, when the owner is Armada Floating Gas Storage Malta Ltd, and the charterer presumably is Electogas?

In what is a surreal situation, the Prime Minister and his inner circle of two go about beaming from ear to ear as though their modus operandi is normal and acceptable. It is not.

Before the election, Muscat said that the country needed a new power station run on LNG ready and operational within one year, for the purposes of bringing down the electricity tariffs. The government of the time said that that was nonsense. It said it was the BWSC plant and the interconnector that would be the catalyst for change in the price of energy in Malta.

In fact, three years down the line the power station is not finished and electricity prices have come down precisely because of the BWSC plant and the interconnector and the record price of oil. Yet the electorate bought Mizzi’s ‘desktop presentation’ of a new power station fuelled by LNG stored in two land-based tanks each carrying 30,000 cubic metres. My searches then revealed that there were only four ships worldwide with a 40,000-cubic-metre capacity that would be required to refill these tanks.

Since LNG cannot be discharged in part like crude oil because of its properties, the replenishing of two land-based tanks each carrying 30,000 cubic metres of LNG had to be done via a very small LNG carrier, which are rare. Clearly there was something odd with the plan. In fact, after the election we were informed that the two land-based storage tanks had disappeared from the plan and instead the LNG would be supplied by a floating storage unit (FSU) permanently moored in the bay with a capacity of 120,000 tons.

Has the promised maritime impact assessment been carried out yet?

Now we know that the FSU is the 125,582-cubic-metre capacity Armada LNG Mediterrana.

Since then, the government has entered into a contract with Electrogas binding the country to purchase electricity for a period of 18 years at prices way above the cost through the interconnector, and has put up a €360 million guarantee to cover the obligations of Electrogas with Bank of Valletta – all secretive, without a single document having made it to the table of the House of Representatives. I hear the Prime Minister is up for the Mr Transparency of the Year award.

In the meantime, the very idea of having an LNG ship of those dimensions bang in the middle of a commercial harbour brimming with activity, without a protective breakwater, is frankly mad. That activity includes an oil storage facility, a Freeport which today welcomes the largest container carriers in the world, a substantial private fishing fleet, an aquaculture centre, bunkering facilities, the BWSC power station and the new power station itself, together with the resident popu­lation of Birżebbugia and Marsaxlokk.

LNG must be carried and stored at a temperature of -161˚C, failing which it turns into gas and multiplies by 600 in volume – imagine that? So of course the next question is: “Has the promised maritime impact assessment been carried out yet?” I have been asking for this for close to three years and the Mepa permit was granted on condition that this maritime impact assessment is carried out.

As a maritime lawyer involved in numerous maritime casualties I would expect the mari­time impact assessment to deal with the impact of the vicious southeasterly winds and seas on a stationary FSU moored to a jetty carry­ing LNG without a protective breakwater.

I would expect it to confirm that each and every pointer in the SIGTTO industry bible LNG operations in Port Areas has been followed to a T.

I would expect there to be a risk analysis of the likelihood of a collision with the carrier or with the other vessel that is expected to moor alongside once a month to refuel the LNG carrier. I would expect it to assess the potential effects of such an incident.

I would also expect it to take to heart the very loaded sentence in the Papadakis report that was used by the government and applicants at Mepa to justify the approval by Mepa of the permit.

This report, which was bandied about during the marathon Mepa hearing in March 2014, came down in favour of the carrier in the middle of the bay. However it stated that “the immediate ignition of releases is a remote probability, assuming that the areas within the boundaries of the FSU location, including loading/unloading, are ignition free”.

This means that ignition of the gasses is remote because it is assumed that there is no ignition source. Well, that is so reassuring isn’t it! What if there is an ignition source such as in a collision, or any other incendiary – fireworks perhaps – then what? Then we will have a tragedy of disastrous proportions.

The bottom line is that what this country needs is not pictures of the Prime Minister at a delivery ceremony. It needs to see the contracts signed behind its back and it needs to draw comfort from a maritime impact assessment that will guarantee that the operation is safe for all.

Ann Fenech is president of the executive committee of the Nationalist Party.

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