If you speak Italian, here’s another video you should watch
This is a public relations production for an LNG project off the east coast of Italy, so you can’t exactly accuse the producers of false scaremongering and hysteria when they speak about positioning the giant vessel miles out to sea to guarantee safety absolutely.
The bits about environmental considerations are also rather interesting.
Can you imagine Electrogas, the consortium of companies which has colluded with the government on this offensive monstrosity, to its financial advantage and, hopefully, not also to the financial advantage of anybody within the government, producing anything like this as a public affairs initiative?
In Malta, businesses collude with the government, leaving the public out of the equation, exactly as would happen in a third-world state or a dictatorship, but never in a fully evolved democracy with an empowered electorate.
This thing is being carried through as though the only stakeholders are the prime minister, the prime minister’s best friend and fellow minister Edward Zammit Lewis, Zammit Lewis’s personal friends, with whom he has socialised regularly for years, who are shareholders in Electrogas, and Electrogas itself.
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This is the second example from Italy having a similar project. Difference is they chose to moor the ships out at sea away from the people. Livorno and Ancona must serve as a disclaimer to Joseph Muscat and his indifferent cabinet.
Not indifferent cabinet but accomplice cabinet.
This is an informative read, too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7881388.stm
erratum: 140,000 cubic metres…
This is reckless if not criminal behaviour by all the “stakeholders” you mentioned.
This short film is an eyeopener.
34 kilometres offshore they say. For safety reasons.
Our PM and his semi-conscious energy minister say it is safer inside Marsaxlokk Bay.
Frauds, the lot of them.
“In Malta, businesses collude with the government, leaving the public out of the equation”
And they claim to be socialists!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqcDeniHkd8
This is opposition to a “regassificatore a porto Empedocle”. They want the ship 15km out at sea so that it would not be seen from shore.
Livorno put the FSRU 22km away so that it won’t be seen and still there is opposition based on cruise liners and the environment.
We in Malta really do have abysmal standards and we have a long way to go to reach Sicilian standards let alone be the “Best in Europe”.
Il-veru noqghodu ghal-kollox.
Oh but there’s opposition to the one in the video in Ancona as well.
They’re concerned about environmental effects on the seabed and chemicals used to clean the gas of additives to make it stable at low temperatures.
And all we get is a prime minister who tries to ridicule the leader of the opposition when all he did was insult the people of Marsaxlokk with his ‘guarantee’.
And Lawrence Gonzi was arrogant, they said.
Quite a detail about Zammit Lewis there. Evarist Bartolo had raised hell about the BWSC plant.
His theory was that the technology had somehow been dumped on us.
They based their whole strategy on that plant, its conversion capabilities giving them the chance to sell it for 150 million Euros.
This project besides being inherently safer for the community as it is located 20 nm offshore, it is also safer for vessel.
The vessel is anchored via a single buoy (which will also be used to transfer CNG on shore). The advantage of single line mooring, as opposed to permanent mooring to a jetty, is that the ship can actually rotate and will always have her bow pointing into the wind and waves. The ship can therefore just ride over the waves.
With an FSU moored to a jetty inside the port the ship will probably get the full force of wind and waves on her beam especially in SE or SW winds depending on positioning. One can only imagine the strain on the windward mooring lines in F8-9 winds.
Exactly, which is why the captain of the LNG Gemini demanded a breakwater to protect the ship from that periodic gale. It’s your Sliema Gregale multiplied by the bay’s contours.
We’ll have the ship lurching as it’s connected to rigid pipework supposedly set on piles driven into bedrock. They’re asking for it.
Seems Labour’s not aware of the extent of swell which hits that bay, except the people of Marsaxlokk and Birzebbuga. Strange.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140316/local/prime-minister-in-bid-to.510878
Muscat’s reaction verges on the grotesque. At one point he seems to imply Simon Busuttil could be proposing to have tanks onshore, or that LNG isn’t what the opposition really wants.
The man’s obscene, or maybe a cornered rat.
One detail to point out, his proposal to remove the ship chosen means the vessel leaves but the regasifier remains, unused, when or if the pipeline’s in place. Whereas having the ship with an integrated regasifier means the ship leaves and no capital remains to waste.
The problem with Muscat is that he just has to politicise technical issues to an extent that solutions will never be at their best. Just his political expedients.
Someone from Labour with a minimum of technical sense please have a word with the man, calm him down and get him to reason things out.
Engineering isn’t an opinion to fight through, just plain fact, the reason why it’s normally complex to make it dull.
Controversy arises elsewhere, indeed the very opposite of technical solutions.
L-ikbar trux min ma jridx jisma’ – jew jisma’ izda xorta wahda jitnejjek minn haddiehor.
The key element in this video is in the opening statement. The FSU will be located 34km off the coast “to ensure absolute safety.” Yet here, the Prime Minister and his cronies want us to believe that having the FSU within a few metres of land is ‘absolutely safe.’ If it wasn’t tragic, it would be laughable.