Dragging our heels and losing the treasure

A MILLIONAIRE uncle taught me that any fool can make promises and pots of money; only a wise man keeps both.
I have chosen JS Bach’s, Matthäus-Passion – with alto, Rene Jacobs singing the aria, ‘Erbarme dich mein Gott’ – as our president’s swan song: ‘Have mercy, Lord, on me. Regard my bitter weeping. Look at me, heart and eyes both weep to Thee, bitterly.’
But as the Germans know, our passionate ‘Christoffhäus’ is way too proud a president to entertain such humility. After his past five year reign of terrible blunders, he seems convinced that ‘immense hydrocarbon deposits’ rumoured in our ‘Waters of Oz’ will be the saviour of our economy.
Nobly, we struck gas in early 2012, and like the Klondike Gold Rush of Canada in 1896, a species of hymenoptera (anthropoids prospectus) have collected around the honey pot; the USA, Russia, China and the EU, with Turkey threatening to remove the sting from our home grown fat drones, when in fact it will be removed by any or all of the above manipulating the mandibular nerve of our newly elected troika president.
We are still a long way off benefitting from any rumoured wealth. Our self-inflated Wizard of Oz, Solon Kassinis has only just begun his journey along that yellow brick road to fortune. There are still innumerable outstanding problems to overcome; price, politics, policing and profit to name but a few.
And there is one we must now take seriously, notably hydraulic fracturing, which is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer by a pressurised fluid. Some hydraulic fractures form naturally and can create conduits along which gas and petroleum from source rocks may migrate to reservoir rocks. Induced hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking is a technique used to release petroleum, natural gas (including shale gas, tight gas, and coal seam gas), or other substances for extraction.
Due to the relatively recent widespread introduction of this method, the USA claims they will be self-sufficient in fossil fuels within five years, no longer reliant on the Middle East. France and Canada have joined the race. By the time gas is extracted from our ‘Waters of Oz’ it will likely halve in value – even becoming unviable to extract given the outlay required not only to drill, but transport, liquefy and pipe to distant consumer markets.
The competition from the fast growing renewable energies such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves and geothermal heat, collectively of paramount importance in a world undergoing climate change, make promises of our long term gas wealth look increasingly tenuous.
Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue. And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true. But ironically, Cyprus does not even need a fart of gas given our blue skies and average of 10 hours daily sunshine. Had we installed hundreds of wind and solar energy farms yesterday instead of buying BMWs and Mercs, we would not be in the economic mess we’re in today – energy is today’s gold as much as fresh water will be tomorrow’s.
Noble Energy have twice put back the date for drilling a second borehole in Aphrodite’s Block 12. Maybe there isn’t as much gas down there as we think, and just maybe, our Minister of Commerce Neoclis Sylikiotis has asked Noble to hold off until he has negotiated ‘best terms’ for the sale of other blocks. And why did Noble not take any of the four blocks on offer? The dream of wealth from the ‘Waters of Oz’ could end in deception, tears and bitter weeping.
Our presidential candidates should not make gas and the sale of it, whether in blocks or forward placements, their prima facie case for election. Contenders who don’t even mention it in their election manifestoes, but instead suggest sound ways forward to combat our bankrupt economy, will win valuable points over their rivals.
We should, for example, be told how much the cost of living will rise over the next five year term – by how much direct and indirect taxation will increase after we sign troika memoranda – by how much wages and pensions will fall and unemployment climb, etc. We must prepare and be prepared! Forewarned is forearmed. Spaniards are moving to Germany in search of work, where 500,000 skilled and semi-skilled jobs are on offer. Cypriot post grads no longer see any point in returning to Cyprus.
The Cyprob has been a dead duck for 38 years, so why bother mentioning it when the population in the north (barely one fifth of Turkish Cypriot origin) now totals one third that of the south. It is rumoured that 20,000 Turkish Cypriots now live in the south – an ‘advance army’ in readiness for an inverted take-over of the entire island by Turkey. Ah, rumours! We need to be given hope, not despair!
Greece has already signed away the future of her next three generations by accepting troika addenda to already agreed memoranda – that’s 45 years of the ordinary man paying off banker, government and politician induced national debt! The Greek diaspora is four years old and on-going. The Mediterranean basin is destined to become a no-go area other than for tourism, wine and olive oil.
I advise all three presidential candidates to stop blathering on about hydrocarbons and get down to giving us the hard facts about the state of our economy, money laundering, bank debt and NPLs in an effort to save Cyprus from a fate worse than Greece. Thus far I’ve heard little of consequence from any of them and now prefer to listen to JS Bach.
‘Alas! Now is our Saviour, gone!’ is the magnificent aria with chorus which precedes ‘Have mercy, Lord, on me…’ But AKEL have yet to weep bitter tears over the impending loss of their blameless leader.