The Eni offer of a gas pipeline had some interesting features. The capital cost was to be borne by Eni but was to be recovered over 25 years from the sale of a fixed quantity of gas governed by some price-fixing mechanism.

Enemalta was reluctant to play. The price of gas was too high; utility rates would not have decreased, said Lawrence Gonzi. This is not surprising, given the rock-bottom levels tariffs were at in 2003 and their detachment from real generation costs. We are also told that we would have had to pay for gas we did not use.

That may sound odd but it is probably a reference to a “minimum usage” condition, stipulating the smallest amount of gas that could be purchased.

Clearly, our demand was below the Eni figure, a state resulting in having to pay for gas you were not using. And we also had to pay to convert the whole of Delimara power station to gas.

We are now keen to go for gas. So what’s new? We still have to convert DPS but now with a new element: the HFO-burning BWSC plant.

Starting at €27 million, the BWSC plant conversion price has now reached €60 million.

That apart, we are asking for European Union help with pipeline capital expense. The Prime Minister has just said that “it seems (sic) to have been granted”, though amount and time (post-2014 Budget, in any case) are unknown.

Incidentally, the EU aid timeline is the factor that is pushing pipeline timescales into the five-seven-year bracket.

That leaves the real bone of contention: the gas supply. In 2003, our demand was clearly below the Eni minimum usage level. That year (with a famously hot summer in which Enemalta faced the highest demand ever: 430MW), Enemalta generated 2300GWh of energy. In 2010 and 2011, because of recession and other factors, Enemalta sent out less than 2200 GWh.

So our present gas demand would be about the same as in 2003 (probably less because of more efficient machinery).

With projected rates of growth of demand of two per cent (beginning to look too high) our demand for gas may not move much above that in 2003 in the medium term. So we may be faced with the same problem in drawing up a gas supply contract.

One of the criticisms levelled at Labour’s LNG plan – which ‘solves’ the low demand conundrum by adjusting the tanker frequency – is that there are few small capacity LNG tankers around. Apart from the flexibility of LNG tankers in having multi-terminal destinations, there are even fewer (zero, actually) low-capacity pipelines around, unless we have one made especially for us, of course.

So a desire for gas from pipeline, thwarted in 2003, not taken up again in 2006-2008 as by then it would have been too late to beat the looming EU Marsa death sentence, may still meet the 2003 pipeline obstacles in 201X. Our problem is that LNG has by no means been brought in from the cold yet.