Eksetra Eksetra: Saviour Balzan is on another mission, Mission Eksetra Eksetra
Go straight t0 3:20 if you want to miss the reason Malta Today isn’t targeting Anglu Farrugia anymore, plus barter arrangements ETCETERA.
When Saviour interviews somebody nowadays, instead of concentrating on the interview, you spend your time working out what his vested interest or agenda is.
Oh, and his mother is a teacher but still she hasn’t taught him that the T in etcetera is pronounced as a T not as a K, or that ‘et’ is the Latin for ‘and’ while ‘ek’ means nothing.
The meaning of et cetera (contracted in contemporary usage to etcetera), for the benefit of the editor and owner of Malta Today:
‘and other things/matters of this nature’.
Incidentally, Saviour was a teacher too. At St Edward’s, if you please. Mal-puliti u l-hajkless. Mur ara jekk kien jghidilhom eksetra ukoll – eksetra, bil-Malti.
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I am not sure who is trying to sell this technology to Malta. Is it Henrik Fleisher or is it Saviour Balzan?
For the sake of avoiding confusion, Mr. Fleisher is the man on the right hand side of the screen.
I would have thought he would try to find other words rather than “the postive, the blue rather than the red” (7:58)
Interesting to note that they were running banner advertisements for Sargas on Maltatoday in the last days
S. Balzan used to teach me Environmental Studies at St.Edward’s. Some of his phrases I recall are:
“The trees, they grow”
“The fish, they swim”
“The waves, they crush”
Have seen the article below, and 51 questions came to mind. But having read Daphne’s article on The Independent, I thought I will set out only a few for now.
1. Why is Joseph Muscat advocating for Sargas?
2. Why is the Leader of the Opposition taking a stand in favour of a specific company and its technology which has not been subjected to a public procurement process, including the technical and financial evaluation of that company?
3. If there is a public procurement process, is the Leader of the Opposition not tainting the process?
4. Why does this remind me of his alleged meetings with Bateman?
“The Sargas proposal was raised this week in parliament by the two political leaders. Opposition leader, Joseph Muscat said that this proposal could drastically reduce electricity tariffs and solve the energy crisis.”
And then:
5. Why is Malta Today being used as a portal for Alert Creative, a marketing company?
6. When was it last that Malta Today carried an article about a seminar organised by a marketing company to promote a specific company’s technology?
7. Who exactly is organising the seminar: is it Alert Creative, or is it Sargas, and is Sargas a client of Alert Creative? Are there other technologies by others being marketed in the seminar?
8. Who is behind Alert Creative?
http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/national/Sargas-announce-they-would-halve-electricity-bills
Is Sargas the new Santa?
Alert’s owner is a Malta Today columnist.
How about question 9 :
How many power stations using this “innovative” technology have been built and commissioned?
Their web site http://www.sargas.no/ makes no mention of any power stations already built or ordered. It only states that its concept is being tested at a power plant in Sweden. It appears this company wants to use Malta as a testbed for yet untested technology in what would turn out to be a very expensive (for Malta) experiment with yet unknown, possibly disastrous, results.
Daphne, do you sometimes realise what you have just written in an article before posting it. Reading your opinion for the past months I realise that 75% of your articles are about some word, phrase and pronounciation which surely are not what make or fail from making great analysts, politicians, diplomats whatever. Could you please begin providing “artikli ta’sugu”?
You can always find ‘artikli ta’ sugu’ to your liking somewhere else. Cara daqs il-kristall.
I only saw 4 minutes 20 seconds of this interview but in that short time, Balzan seemed to be doing a sales-pitch for Sargas.
It would be most interesting to find out who the local Sargas representative happens to be.
They may be pushing Sargas so that the local rep can get a commission equal to or greater than the one received by the BWSC rep. Just keeping up with the Joneses?
At the earliest, Sargas can have the plant up and running is not before 2016. Had they been the choice, (instead of the Delimara extension) what would have happened with the Marsa power station? Would it have to remain operating well beyond the EU stipulated operating hours at a punitive cost?
Such is the economic prowess of Joseph and Edward.
From the Financial Times, April 30 2010.
‘A very technical CCS controversy by Kate Mackenzie
Carbon capture and sequestration is nothing if not controversial. The cost, effectiveness and the public reaction to extracting CO2 from coal- or gas-fired plants and storing it underground are still hotly debated, and likely will continue to be until a commercial-scale power generation CCS project is fully up and running.
Two Texas-based engineers last year pointed out what they see as an unavoidable technical flaw in the whole proposition: the pure limitations of how much CO2 can be stored. Their work has drawn strong criticism from four geologists.
The authors of the original reports, Christine Economides-Ehlig of Texas A&M University and husband Michael Economides of Houston University, presented a paper to a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference, and this year had a journal article published which attracted the attention of the Guardian. Economides outlined the work on his blog at the Houston Chronicle’s website:
The conclusions are quite negative and, in fact, sobering. Earlier published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions. Kyoto Protocol or successor accords would imply orders of magnitude larger problem than anything possible as CCS.
The full paper looks at existing CO2 sequestration carried out in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in deep saline aquifers and in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs to show that CCS is not possible on the scale expected of it, for climate change mitigation purposes.
However CCS is nothing if not technically complex, either. Four geologists from the UK and Canada have written a rebuttal of Economides’ and Economides-Ehlig’s paper, arguing that:
In essence, this unusual theory assumes that storage of CO2 will be injected to the deep subsurface into a sealed container, with no-flow of existing water through the lid, sides, or base. Un-surprisingly, if extra CO2 fluid is added to a sealed container, the pressure within the container will increase.
The problem, they say, is the assumptions on which this is based:
The most profound error, is that the subsurface is not made of sealed boxes. If it were, then oil and gas would not have been able to move for tens or hundreds of kilometers laterally and vertically, to be caught in the traps where these fluids are discovered today. The oil industry would not exist.
There are other errors, they add; most importantly the assumption that the reservoir is only 30 metres thick. The authors in their full response say that between them they have analysed 20 CO2 injection, only one of which experienced a severe pressure problem and nine of which operate – or could operate – at industrial scale.’ …………..’
The technology in question, is still untested on an industrial scale, and if these people want to sell the system, they should come clean about the real issues they’re facing in the US.
My question is why they offer a full power plant and not the CCS system as an auxiliary modular component to existing plants.
It does seem that by doing so, the coal lobby intends to gain a stronger foothold in the EU. Wouldn’t it be wiser to go for cleaner fuels, and shouldn’t these people offer a tested system which builds on those?
Many years have passed since those Cottonera days, and, to this day, we still poke fun at his pronunciation “end di sojl, di sojl; dij ecit rejn!” (Environmental Studies)
Daphne, surely you must have a good contact at St Edward’s to give you his absent rate, and other teachers having to give his classes. Imbaghad jippriedka “f’gieh is-sewwa “.