Labour keeps up attack on climate change U-turn to favour BWSC’s diesel engine

The PL’s spokesperson for environment and climate change Leo Brincat is charging the government of having abandoned plans for natural gas [opens climate change report] when the Danish firm BWSC was being favoured for the construction of the Delimara plant.

According to Brincat, the Enemalta chief executive who chaired the adjudication committee for the award of the €200 million, 144MW extension contract – David Spiteri Gingell – was an early proponent of natural gas as chairman of the government’s climate change committee.

A first draft report in January 2009 on climate change incorporated an estimate of the investment required for the country to go for natural gas within six years. But the committee later removed the obligation of going for natural gas “and paved the way for the use of a plant operated by other sources of energy, including heavy fuel oil.”

Brincat said Spiteri Gingell’s stance changed once BWSC had been awarded the contract for its diesel engine, over a combined-cycle gas turbine proposed by Israeli firm Bateman.

Brincat said the electricity generation plan for 2006-2015 never mentioned the use of heavy fuel oil, and that David Spiteri Gingell – Enemalta chief executive between 2007 and 2008 – never took a contrary position on the plan.

“Spiteri Gingell himself had made it clear that natural gas would have to be used by 2012, and infrastructure minister Austin Gatt had spoken in favour of natural gas in 2006 and said that medium-speed diesel did not reach our environmental standards,” Brincat said.

The Labour MP added that on the eve of the 2008 general election, Spiteri Gingell compiled a report citing 2015 as the deadline for getting natural gas on board.

“When in May 2009, the BWSC contract was signed, the climate change committee chaired by Spiteri Gingell was now claiming that carbon credits could be purchased from the emissions market, instead of investing in natural gas, to compensate for emissions. This had never previously been said in the original January 2009 report,” Brincat charged.

“If government keeps harping on this U-turn as its justification for not having the necessary infrastructure for gas, it shows it took no concrete steps to implement the 2006 electricity generation plan when it started this process.

“Now it opened the doors to the use of heavy fuel oil, which is what will be effectively used in the BWSC plant being constructed by Nazzareno Vassallo, whose consultant happens to be Spiteri Gingell,” Brincat said.