News | Wednesday, 09 December 2009

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Government should scrap the BWSC contract – Evarist Bartolo

Charlot Zahra
Following his revelation that the cost of exporting the toxic waste from the proposed extension of the Delimara power station running on Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) had not been factored in the EIA presented on Monday, and that exporting the toxic waste from HFO would amount to €12 million a year, Labour MP Evarist Bartolo has now challenged the Nationalist Government to scrap the whole Delimara Power Station extension contract to BWSC.
“The tendering process has been rotten from beginning to end. Government changed the law and its energy policy to accommodate the BWSC plant,” Bartolo told MaltaToday.
“At every stage major decisions were made by the government and Enemalta to the advantage of BWSC,” he said. “This plant has polluted our country even before starting to operate,” Bartolo sarcastically added.
“At Monday’s public hearing even the EIA proposed that plant should be operated on diesel and not heavy fuel oil,” the Labour MP explained.
“I think the contract should be thrown into the sea, although perhaps better not as it would pollute our marine environment,” he told MaltaToday.
Asked whether it still made sense to run the Delimara Power Station extension on HFO, with its high environmental cost and the additional expense for exporting this hazardous waste abroad, the Labour MP explained that although HFO is the cheapest fuel to buy raw, the processing costs of its toxic by-products make it more expensive than either diesel and gas.
“I have seen technical reports which show clearly that Heavy Fuel Oil, the dirtiest oil on the market, is the cheapest when it comes to buying it but then to process it and clean it up it becomes more expensive than diesel and much more expensive than natural gas,” Bartolo insisted.
Asked about his assessment of the fact that the EIA failed to make a calculation of the total transportation cost for the HFO fuel, and how did this reflect on the integrity of the EIA itself, Bartolo did not mince his words.
“The EIA’s duty is not to carry out a cost/benefit analysis of using Heavy Fuel. That should have been the job of Enemalta and the adjudication board,” Bartolo told MaltaToday.
But government took the political decision to operate the plant on heavy fuel oil “after in its plan for 2006-2015 it said that the new plant would be operated on gas,” the Labour MP added.
“It is scandalous that the adjudication board followed the government’s lead and ensure that BWSC win the contract did not calculate the cost of disposal of toxic waste in awarding the tender,” Bartolo told MaltaToday on Wednesday.
“The board did not analyse carefully the maintenance costs quoted by BWSC so that the bid emerges cheaper than the others’ but it is not realistically priced,” Bartolo charged.
The adjudication board had a formula “designed to the advantage of the BWSC bid”
“The tendering process was just a cover-up as it was a foregone conclusion to award the tender to BWSC with Joseph Mizzi as its local agent with what he referred to as good contacts in top places in local politics and at Enemalta,” the Labour MP said.

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