The fact that the government will miss its second specific deadline on its cornerstone electoral pledge – that of building and commissioning a new gas-fired power station in Delimara within two years of being elected – is a serious matter from a political standpoint.

The government’s leading electoral pledge in early 2013 was that the new power station would be up and running by March 2015 - a deadline that came, went and was revised again to this very month. 

Yesterday this newspaper published news that the power station’s floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), the LNG tanker that will be permanently berthed in Marsaxlokk Bay, will not even be delivered to Malta until this year’s third quarter.

This sets the government’s newest June target back by between one to four months, let alone the several weeks it should take to connect and test the vessel.

The people were promised that such a tight two-year deadline was wholly ‘doable’, when it very clearly was anything but.  They were also promised a land-based storage and regasification facility when all along the government knew full well, as has been exposed by this newsroom, that the floating LNG tanker option only viable option for the power station.  Anything else that the government was pledging was, it now transpires, clearly undoable.

In fact, this newsroom recently revealed that the land-based storage of LNG to fuel the new Delimara power station would have cost anywhere between US$500 million and US$1 billion, as opposed to a price tag of between US$50 million and US$250 million for the FSRU option.

According to documentation from the former power station project’s lead developer Gasol dating back to 2012, at the time that the Labour Party was actually piecing together its grand energy plan, the land-based storage option the Labour Party had sold to the electorate would have taken four to five years to construct, as opposed to the one to two years for an FSRU.

It should have been clear from the beginning that the FSRU option was the only option being considered by the government.  And although that much is clear with hindsight, and thanks to documentation evidencing that which was uncovered by this newsroom, it is now amply evident that even the FSRU option has thrown the project’s timings out of whack, let alone the four to five year estimate for a land-based facility.

The public was, in fact, only informed of the FSRU option at the beginning of 2014 – a year into the project and a little over a year before the first deadline.  And, given the public outcry over the prospect of that permanently berthed floating LNG tanker being placed in Marsaxlokk Bay, it is understandable that the government had not wanted to advertise it, had pretended it was going for the land-based option, and only announced it when it was absolutely constrained to do so. 

There is, however, a possible silver lining to the delayed delivery of the FSRU.  Now that there is a little more time at the government’s disposal, proper risk assessments on the potentially dangerous project could be carried out, assessments that have been sorely lacking for a project of such magnitude.

Such risk assessments will also have to ensure that the project falls in line with The EU’s Seveso II rules on the control of major accident hazards involving dangerous substances. Very little along such lines, however, has been done so far and the residents of the greater Marsaxlokk Bay area are still acutely concerned over the LNG tanker prospect.

Much of the hysteria that had taken hold back when the LNG tanker had first been announced has faded away, but it will certainly resurface this summer/autumn once the tanker is finally delivered to the new power station.  But, by then, the time for protestations will have expired.  The government has already showed that it cares not for residents’ concerns, as evidenced by its clear lack of risk assessment studies on this element of the project.

It will care even less a few months from now and with its newest ‘summer’ deadline about to slip it by.

The government has thrown its own deadlines out the window but, even more concerning, it has thrown residents’ fears for their own safety out the window as well for the sake of getting this ‘doable’ project done…at least in time for the next general election.