A mandatory order for Mepa officials to attend the forthcoming meeting of the Select Committee on Black Dust Precipitation is being issued by Speaker Michael Frendo because it failed to nominate technical officials to attend a meeting that was held today.
Opposition spokesman on the environment Leo Brincat raised the issue at the beginning of the meeting, saying it was unacceptable for the regulator to fail to send its representatives to the meeting after Mepa was invited to do so by Dr Frendo.
Enemalta technical officers explained that boilers 3, 4 and 5 at the Marsa station and the two boilers at Delimara did not have precipitators while boilers 6, 7 and 8 at Marsa had precipitators because they had previously been using coal.
Mr Grima said that Enemalta used filters, the quality of fuel and control of combustions to contain fly ash, which had previously been disposed of in disused quarries and also sold to private contractors for mixing with concrete.
This was discontinued on the insistence of Mepa officials and, for some time, Enemalta collected fly ash in its silos. This was presently exported to Italy and Spain.
Enemalta had been monitoring emissions since the early nineties but the systems used were not so reliable. Better monitoring started in early 2000 and readings were documented.
Enemalta's chief technical officer engineer Peter Grima said the samples analysed had a very low content of nickel and vanadium to link these particles to the dust emitting form the power station. Heavy fuel oil contained some amounts of these chemicals but the minimal amount found in the samples showed that the content from Enemalta was inexistent or minimal.
He said that soot blowing is carried out by Enemalta on a daily basis and that Enemalta adopted measures which ensured that emissions were according to EU directives and accepted levels.
Professor Agius said that dust particles which were so tiny as to seem invisible were more dangerous for health. He said that information on air pollution has been gathered by Mepa for the last few years when such information had been continuously gathered for the last 40 years in the UK. He said that dust in Malta included salt, sand and concentration of sulphur dioxide.