A pipeline connecting Malta to mainland Europe should be focused on green hydrogen and other renewable gases rather than LNG, political party Volt Malta believes.

The party, which was established last year and will be contesting its first general election locally, said that an LNG pipeline should not receive EU funding, because that would trigger an “immoral” payout to the Electrogas consortium and because Malta lags sorely behind EU renewable energy targets. 

“A commitment to a natural gas pipeline won’t get us any closer to reaching our 2030 target of 11.5% [of energy derived from renewable sources] if this pipeline was built by 2028,” said Volt Malta candidate and vice president Kassandra Mallia. 

“A pipeline if any, should strictly be based on renewable gases only but not one that compensates Electrogas," she said.

Volt deputy president Kassandra Mallia.

The Electrogas consortium built and operates the LNG-fuelled power station in Delimara. One of its shareholders, Yorgen Fenech, stands accused of complicity in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

EU legislators have said that funding should not benefit anyone involved in criminal activity "directly or indirectly". 

Malta failed to secure EU funding for a gas pipeline last year and has since been working to revise pipeline plans to make them also suitable to transporting hydrogen. 

The country’s hopes of securing EU funds were given a boost last month, when Brussels said that it would classify gas and nuclear power projects as “sustainable”. 

The EU Commission has defended that arrangement, with commissioner Mairead McGuinness saying that the “imperfect solution” is needed to speed up the transition away from heavy polluting fuels such as coal. 

In a statement on Friday, Volt Malta said that it would also carry out feasibility studies to see how green hydrogen could be used in Malta – and whether it could be generated locally. 

To encourage shareholder activism, the party is proposing to carry out a partial Initial Public Offering, or IPO, of such a project. It did not provide any details of how such an IPO would be structured. 

Malta should lobby more aggressively to ensure European energy independence and a greater focus on renewable energy sources, it said, adding that interconnector energy sources should be transparent and increasingly renewable.