Portugal’s President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, was in Loulé on Thurday, 21st July, to present a Municipal Medal of Honour to local author Lídia Jorge.
The ceremony took place at the Ciné-Teatro where mayor Vítor Aleixo said to Jorge, "This distinction is a small tribute for all that you have done for us," adding that, "Lídia Jorge is the expression and the feeling of a community."
Having already been awarded the Municipal Medal of Merit - Silver in 1993, the writer who was born in Boliqueime, now has been awarded the highest municipal award available.
Outside the Ciné-Teatro there was a small demonstration against oil and gas exploration in the Algarve and against tolls on the Via do Infante.
Anti-oil organisers took the opportunity of the presidential visit to hand Rebelo de Sousa a folder containing copies of concession contracts, the decree law covering their signing, reports on ecological and economic impacts, a copy of a public petition with 11,500 signatures, complaints to various authorities, requests for information from the government, and 500 written messages asking for an end to hydrocarbon exploration in the Algarve.
"The package was intended to help the President of the Republic to gain a clearer idea of the real problem and of the negative impact that the oil industry could bring to the region, according to demonstrators," according to members of PALP.
The covering letter exhorted the President to intercede and ask the government to scrap the existing concession agreements for oil exploration and extraction.
In a curious statement, delivered in a light-hearted manner, the President said that finding oil or gas in the Algarve on land or out to sea was as likely as his going to the moon and that there are big risks in life "and this is not a very big risk."
Recalling that the original laws covering oil exploration were passed in 1994, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that in 22 years there has been no exploitation when the oil price has been "very high", so it will be difficult now, especially in a place where the probability of finding oil is "very low."
Despite the President’s comments that there is little likelihood of finding hydrocarbons off the Algarve’s coast, he will be well aware of the statements made by Repsol’s Max Torres at a meeting in January, 2014 during where investors were briefed on existing opportunities.
Torres, Repsol's Director of Exploration for Europe and the Middle East, stated that Repsol had discovered a major gas field off the Algarve coast, big enough to match Poseidon in the Bay of Cadiz. Torres disclosed during the briefing that the Algarve gas field find contains an estimated half a trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas.
Partex, owned by the influential Gulbenkian Foundation, often has reminded the government that the probability of success was low in the full knowledge that a huge gas field already had been found with 'enough gas for 15 years' from a 'low risk' operation.
António Costa e Silva from Partex also has stated that there are reserves off the Algarve coast sufficient to address Portugal's needs for at least 15 years, and that the size of the gas field in the Lagosta and Lagostim concessions is twenty times that of the Poseidon field in the Bay of Cadiz.
The President of the Republic knows this, so his comments yesterday, aimed at calming a concerned Algarve public, are at best disingenuous as by sticking to mentions of 'oil' he was able to avoid commenting on 'gas' whcih he knows exists in abundance.
See also
'Repsol and government misled public over Algarve gas field find'
algarvedailynews.com - March 20, 2016
