Malta will be in line with the EU's 2020 target for the reduction of greenhouse gases five years before the deadline, a confident Res-ources Minister George Pullicino said yesterday.
The new power station, the submarine electricity link with Sicily and the decommissioning of the Marsa plant would be enough to cut Malta's greenhouse gas levels to below the EU's 2020 threshold, he said. "Just these three factors will bring us in line."
Speaking during the launch of a strategy which lists 96 measures to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions, Mr Pullicino defended the controversial Delimara power plant extension and insisted that Enemalta had made the right choice.
The €200 million extension, which will run on heavy fuel oil, was not at odds with the measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Mr Pullicino insisted.
On Saturday, the Labour Party announced it would be presenting a motion in Parliament condemning the "contaminated" contract awarded to Danish firm BWSC. The main contention is that BWSC's plant will be running on fuel oil rather than the cleaner gas version offered by its competitors.
But the minister insisted yesterday that the extension of the power station was sorely needed because the country could not continue running the Marsa power station for much longer.
"We cannot wait until we use natural gas - even if natural gas is not used until 2016, the country will still be in line with the EU emissions level," he said.
The government, in fact, has argued that Malta cannot have the gas technology up and running in time because of problems with the supply of natural gas to Malta. The fuel oil turbines are thought of as solutions since they can later be converted to run on gas, once the pipeline from Sicily is in place.
Still, by 2020 Malta has to bring down its greenhouse gas emissions to five per cent below its 1990 level and it is currently far off the mark. To achieve the target it will have to reduce emissions created in 2008 by half in just 11 years.
The power stations alone generate 62 per cent of the country's emissions. Transport follows next with 17 per cent while waste generates around 6.6 per cent.
But with the strategy launched yesterday, Mr Pullicino is confident the targets can be met.
The document, called National Strategy for Policy and Abatement Measures Relating to the Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions, has a list of wide-ranging measures affecting the transport, education and energy sectors.
Drawn up by the Climate Change Committee, the document lists the deadlines by when the measures should be implemented and will be discussed in Parliament next week.
But not all these measures are concrete and many need research and consultation before implementation. Committee chairman David Spiteri Gingell said many of the suggestions were "simply the beginning of an exercise to study these measures".
The feedback during the three-month consultation period was very poor with only 12 submissions.
None of the political parties, except the Nationalist Party, gave their input and the only government entity to take part was the Malta Environment and Planning Authority.
Mr Pullicino criticised the Labour Party for not giving any input and creating obstacles instead.