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  • Chevron’s solar panels won’t clean up it’s filthy oilfield

     

     

    The company is proud enough of the solar panels to have a promotional video on Operation Brightfield. Chevron’s local vice president, Bruce Johnson, calls the solar facility “a clear example of Chevron’s efforts to find ways to integrate innovative technologies into our business.”

     

    But the Rainforest Action Network, a California-based NGO, put out a natty little video of its own charging the company with “greenwash” in the California sun.

     

    Chevron is the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter in California, according to RAN. And its global green reputation could do with some refurbishing. The company is still living down the environmental damage caused by past involvement of Texaco, a company it bought in 2001, while grabbing oil from the rainforests of Ecuador.

     

    And it faces new criticism for its prominent role in developing tar sands in Canada. This latter is a big problem, as the California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeks to cut the state’s carbon dioxide emissions.

     

    RAN says last year Chevron hit a “new all-time low in renewable energy investments”, with just 1.96 per cent of its capital and exploratory budget going green.

     

    So the plaudits Chevron has won for its Brightfield test rigs, along with a planned solar project in New Mexico, are green gold dust.

     

    But its dirty old ways still look like the main game at Chevron. You can see its real business down the road from the shiny new solar panels, at the Kern River heavy oil facility. The field is more than a century old and contains some 10,000 “nodding donkey” rigs pumping away. The field is largely exhausted, with production declining every year, but Chevron is reluctant to call a halt to its ancient money-spinner.

     

    But bringing the oil to the surface is increasing difficult, and energy-intensive. The thick tar-like dregs of the oilfield won’t flow on their own. They have to be heated first. So Chevron burns natural gas to make steam, which it pumps underground to raise temperatures and get the gunge moving. They call it “steam flooding”. One reporter invited to Kern River by the American Petroleum Institute describes the scene on The Oil Drum.

     

    Chevron is a specialist in extracting heavy oil round the world. In Venezuela and Indonesia, for instance. But bringing the stuff to the surface has a very large carbon footprint, according to Tony Kovscek of Stanford University’s Energy Resources Engineering department, who has studied Kern River.

     

    He estimates (pdf) that the carbon footprint of producing heavy oil at Kern River is around 50kg of carbon dioxide for every barrel of oil.

     

    That is only half the footprint of tar sands in Alberta, he says, “but the carbon footprint of conventional oil is a great deal smaller.”

     

    The company spokesman Alex Yelland said the 750-kW solar facility, which has an expected lifetime of 25 years, is intended “to evaluate competing next generation solar technologies”. He denied any attempt at greenwash. “That the oil field nearby produces heavy oil was not relevant to the siting of the solar test.”

     

     

     

    Kovscek says, “some of the largest point sources of carbon dioxide in California are from these types of oil field operations.” Solar panels powering the pipeline pumps won’t change that.

     

    But, if Chevron wants to carry on pumping heavy oil from Kern River, there would be a way for the company to make a serious difference, he says. It could harness the power of the sun big time to make the steam.

     

    A lot of entrepreneurs in California want to develop what they call “concentrated solar thermal power”. Rather than covering the desert in photovoltaic panels, they want to install mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays and boil water to make steam. Their main idea is to use the steam to run turbines. But why not, says Kovscek, use it directly to free up the heavy oil?

     

    “Relatively conservative designs could reduce the heavy-oil carbon footprint by at least 30%,” he told the Guardian. “More aggressive designs could achieve even greater reductions.” Yelland said that the company plans a “solar-to-steam” demonstration facility to replace some of its natural gas needs at another oil field in California.

     

    Now that really will “integrate innovative technologies” into Chevron’s business. It would put Project Brightside in the shade. Until then, Chevron seems to be using a few solar panels to greenwash a thoroughly filthy oilfield.

  • Stagnant Sydney set to pack in arrivals

    How much credence should we give to this report. Sounds like Govt.induced
    spin to me. 7mn. population in Sydney would be a disaster.
     
    Neville Gillmore
     
    Stagnant Sydney set to pack in arrivals

    • Stephen Lunn and George Megalogenis
    • From: The Australian
    • April 10, 2010 12:00AM
     
    100410 graphic population

    Source: The Australian

    MELBOURNE and Brisbane have accommodated more new residents, and at a faster rate, than Sydney since 2001 — leaving room for the nation’s largest city to take a greater share of Australia’s population increase over coming decades.

    Sydney is ready to begin growing again as its property and employment markets recover after a decade of stagnation.

    Research by The Weekend Australian challenges the urban myth that Sydney is full. On a city-wide basis, Melbourne has always been more densely populated, but the density gap between the two cities has increased over the past decade.

    Brisbane, meanwhile, is closing the gap with Sydney on the people per square kilometre measure.

    The changing nature of the national population will increasingly lend itself to higher-density living in the big cities, according to demographer Peter McDonald, meaning Sydney should be comfortably able to meet a projected seven million population by 2050.

    Related Coverage

    New arrivals from Asia and ageing baby boomers will be comfortable in smaller housing, says Professor McDonald, director of the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute. “Those coming here from Asia are already likely to be living in smaller units than we are accustomed to, and older people are likely to be looking for smaller dwellings with attached services, so these together suggest our cities of the future can be more compact,” he said.

    Both sides of politics spent the week arguing over population policy and the immigration program, amid public unease over Treasury projections of a 35.9 million national population by 2050.

    NSW Premier Kristina Keneally talked up Sydney’s growth potential yesterday, saying skilled migrants would “continue to contribute to increasing prosperity”.

    “Population growth and immigration is particularly critical to NSW and Sydney’s future as a modern international city,” Ms Keneally said.

    Sydney’s inner city remains the most densely populated part of the Australia, but NSW paid a heavy price for deliberately slowing its population growth after 2001.

    NSW population and economic growth rates fell below the national average in each of the past eight years, a significant problem given the established link between population growth and prosperity.

    Between 2001-02 and 2008-09, the NSW population grew by 1 per cent a year on average, compared with the national figure of 1.6 per cent. Slower population growth translated to a slower economy. NSW economic growth was just 1.7 per cent a year, compared with the national rate of 3.2 per cent.

    Sydney accommodated an extra 31 people per square kilometre between 2001 and last year, bringing its total population density to 371 people per square kilometre.

    Melbourne doubled the Sydney effort, with an extra 68 people per square kilometre

  • Bring on the population debate

     

    In reply the Prime Minister, in an effort to calm people’s fears, returns to a favourite playbook of his, putting in place a process for dealing with our population future which the Coalition dismissively describes as coming up “with a plan for a plan”. By appointing Tony Burke as Australia’s first Population Minister the Prime Minister is responding to people’s concerns, he’s acting, but let’s be honest, he’s not in any hurry and Minister Burke is instructed to come up with the basis of population policy in 12 months time. That’s after the election.

    A scare campaign countered by a delaying tactic. Both disguised as responsible policy.

    That’s the bald politics of it, now how about some facts.

    Let’s take the easy one first.

    Asylum seekers arriving by boat are NOT a threat to our population levels and have no place in this debate. Australia takes around 13,500 refugees every year, a number that is capped, so boat arrivals granted refugee status end up as part of that 13,500, reducing the number taken from what’s called ‘the orderly refugee migration program’.

    So if our level of population is the issue, and the immigration numbers within that, you can safely leave asylum seekers out of it.

    So why are Tony Abbott and his immigration shadow, Scott Morison, linking the two? Well it does feed into Tony Abbott’s consistent criticism of Kevin Rudd’s performance. If you can’t manage our borders how can you manage the bigger issue of our immigration levels?

    But critics believe there’s some dog whistling going on too? One senior Liberal described it to me as a “clear and deliberate message that is wrong and dangerous”. He and others on both sides of politics also concede privately that the issue of asylum seekers is once again a big issue across many electorates.

    There’s plenty of Australians who don’t like the idea of people rocking up on boats from faraway places, nor do they much like the idea of high immigration; an ironic yet historic truth about this country of immigrants, many of us are frightened by the idea of being “overrun”.

    I was speaking to one cabbie recently who told me Kevin Rudd had lost his vote because he couldn’t stop the boats coming as he promised and asylum seekers were now being brought to the mainland. He then admitted he himself was an asylum seeker granted refugee status after, wait for it, arriving on a leaky boat.

    It’s a complex issue for any government to manage and that’s what Tony Abbott is counting on.

    Time for some more facts.

    The Opposition says it will cut immigration numbers in order to keep our population levels at a manageable level, reducing the immigration intake down from 300,000 per year under Labor now to around 180,000 per year or below.

    The shadow minister says 300,000 is “out of control” and getting immigration to a sustainable level will obviously mean cuts right across the program, though he doesn’t say where.

    It’s true immigration numbers did shoot up under Labor but most of the increase was in the temporary visa categories of foreign students and temporary workers brought in under the 457 visa scheme. In both categories the surge began under the Howard government.

    At the end of the last financial year of the Howard government, the net migration intake was at 230,000 per year.

    Demographer Peter McDonald says immigration levels are about to plummet to around 180,000 per year and that the Government and the Opposition both know it. That’s because the Rudd Government has closed the loophole in the overseas student program which basically saw international colleges spring up around the country offering cooking and hairdressing courses, but in reality they were little more than backdoor visa factories.

    Earlier this year the Rudd Government changed the skilled migration entry conditions and cut the link between studying here and gaining a visa, and in response overseas student applications have dropped by 17 per cent.

    The Government also slashed the number of 457 visas, used by business to fill immediate skill shortages. The category had swelled during the boom times at the end of the Howard years and in the early days of the Rudd Government, but the demand for workers during the global financial crisis fell.

    Peter McDonald says we will see a lift-off in the 457 visa category again soon because it’s the only way to sustain the latest resources boom and give mining companies access to the labour force they need.

    In contrast, he says our overseas education industry will shrink steeply, not just because of the changes made by the Rudd Government but also because of fierce international competition in this profitable education market.

    The high Australian dollar makes us less competitive. Add to that the pressure universities in the United Kingdom and the United States are under, due to shrinking endowments for American universities as a result of the GFC and substantial cuts to British university budgets, and you can bet they will be actively in the hunt for more foreign students to boost their coffers.

    Overseas students are a money spinner, in this country bringing in $17 billion per year and creating tens of thousands of jobs.

    Another fact worth noting in this debate over immigration and population levels is the number of New Zealanders moving here. There’s currently over 500,000 Kiwis living in this country, that’s 100,000 more than there were just 5 years ago, and the bulk of the new arrivals are choosing to live in Queensland, adding to the considerable population pressure building up in parts of that state.

    Yes, the thought of 36 million Australians is overwhelming if you’re stuck in traffic in Sydney, trying to find a house to buy, let alone afford, in south-east Queensland, or worried about reliable drinking water supplies in Adelaide.

    That’s why we do need a population policy.

    What we don’t need is a scare campaign around immigration to kick it off.

    A population policy is about a lot more than immigration. It’s about our national infrastructure, our roads and hospitals and suburbs and public transport. It’s about housing supply and an affordable housing market. It’s about jobs.

    Its about the environment and sustainability. Former Australian of the year Tim Flannery says this continent should only support a population of less than 16 million. In 1994 the Keating government had a committee for long-term strategies chaired by Barry Jones which found 23 million was our optimum population level.

    Yet we are on a path to 36 million. How will our parched landscape cope with that, where will the water come from, how will we reduce our carbon emissions if we’re increasing our population at such a rate?

    And speaking of climate change, what if our Pacific neighbours find themselves drowning as sea levels rise, won’t there be an expectation that we will reach out and invite them in to dry land – literally to dry land?

    The Opposition calls for a plan to rein in our immigration numbers in a bid to manage our population levels yet it presents little in the way of a plan for substantial cuts to our carbon emissions.

    There’s also scant, conflicting and confusing detail about its intentions when it comes to immigration levels. In fact now Scott Morrison says a cut to immigration is not official Opposition policy. So what is the policy?

    The Opposition Leader’s call for unspecified cuts to immigration has displeased the business community which regards immigration as vital for economic growth and also made many in his own party room unhappy that this important and divisive issue was unleashed in the guise of opposition policy without being discussed internally first.

    When Tony Abbott announced his generous and controversial paid parental leave scheme funded by a tax on business without clearing it with his colleagues he described it as a “leaders call” which he promised would be a “rare thing”. Not one month later and he seems to have made another one, even more controversial.

    In January Tony Abbott said he has no problem with increasing Australia’s population as long as we’ve got the infrastructure to deal with it. He appeared to be endorsing the Prime Minister’s backing for a big Australia, albeit with caveats.

    Fair enough. Bring on the population debate, because without a plan to sustainably support a 30 million plus population many Australians will start to resist and resent immigration and that will always be a difficult debate to have and to manage. But If Tony Abbott is sincere about a sustainable population policy lets dump the ad hoc, contradictory and inflammatory talk and get serious about it.

    Fran Kelly is a presenter on the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast program.

  • The population discussion going on behind closed doors.

     

    Of course our political leaders are aware of these unpalatable truths, and talk about them privately. But they also know they are dynamite issues that, if raised in public, need to be handled with care so that they don’t incite the wrong kind of populist debate that wedges politicians into make the wrong kinds of decisions for Australia’s long-term interests.

    The unnerving part of where we are now is not the existence of the unpalatable truths. It’s the spectre, six months or so from a federal election, of the growing temptation on one side of politics to deploy the dog whistle for a purely electoral dividend.

  • Bob Carr: Why our cities will really choke with population growth

    Bob Carr: Why our cities will really choke with population growth

    by former NSW premier Bob Carr

    The debate is not about immigration and its benefits. We all believe in them — Australia is a migrant nation. The debate is not about multiculturalism and it’s not about the source of migrants. The debate is about whether immigration should be running at very high levels. It’s about whether we end up with a population of 36 million in 2050 in contrast to the previous expectation of 28.5 million.

    There are strong economic arguments against this immigration surge. Immigration worsens skills shortages. The tradesman who’s recruited for a specific job arrives with his family. Immigration adds more to the demand for labour than it contributes to the supply. The Productivity Commission Research Report (2005) The Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia made clear migration does not reverse the ageing of the population.

    Bob Birrell has pointed out you would have to run immigration at very high levels for a very long time to have the slightest effect on population aging. The population is aging in Australia and just about everywhere else. Get used to it. Nurture older workers instead of driving them out of the workforce the moment they turn 55. High immigration is not the solution.

    There have been very silly comments about immigration and infrastructure. I don’t know of any period in the nation’s history when people said that infrastructure had kept pace with population growth. It can’t. The worst gap was in the 1950s when the roads of new suburbs were unpaved and Gough Whitlam’s children had to travel from Cronulla to the city to go to high school and people had to wait years for a PMG-delivered telephone connection and Queensland was an education slum, etc. We will never see that level of under-servicing again.

    Federal and state governments struggle to keep pace. But struggle they always will. Increase the intake and the infrastructure gap will be more acute. South-east Queensland makes the point.

    In January one academic on the 7:30 Report said that we need a new federal authority to take responsibility for all planning. This, he declared, was the answer. Once we have it we can stick to high immigration. Really? As if shifting responsibility to another level of government would dispose of all the arguments over densities, sprawl, social equity, environmental assessment, design and sustainability.

    Actually Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (I don’t know enough to comment on Brisbane and Perth) already have very sound, environmentally sensitive metropolitan plans. Among other things they identify transport corridors and areas around rail stations or transport hubs as locations for higher density development. So they are public transport-based.

    They work to limit urban sprawl. Sydney has been most successful at this, achieving the highest percentage of dwellings in high and medium density. It has also got the highest percentage of the population using public transport.

    But our cities will be more congested with 36 million, no matter how much goes into public transport. The arguments over sprawl and higher densities will be more intense. There will be environmental loss and a loss in quality of life: the beaches choked, the adjacent national parks degraded by force of numbers, the congestion of peak hour more intense (there is no public transport system anywhere in the world that avoids peak hour congestion). The cities will work. They will be different cities and it would be a brave person who would promise they’d offer a better quality of life.

    Yet I’m far more worried about water — that is, about Australia’s erratic rainfall as a constraint on the over-ambitious population growth we seem locked into.

    The business lobby won’t acknowledge any of this; they are focused on the total size of the economy, a crude measure. They don’t look at GDP growth per head. Increasing productivity is going to be harder, not easier, if this runaway immigration continues. And business should stop imagining it can have lower corporate tax rates and high immigration. High immigration mandates higher government outlays, and therefore higher taxation.

    You can’t add millions to the nation’s population and expect a lower tax regime.

    Public opinion has moved — is moving — and I don’t think the high growth option will be entertained politically, by either side.

  • Obama will open large sections of Southeast and Alaskan coasts to offshore drilling

     

     

    “This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” Obama said (full speech here). “…But the bottom line is this: given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we’re going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.

    This is … stunning. Baffling. With the new policy Obama appears to be taking a major step toward siding with carbon-polluting industries in the battle to defend the energy status quo.

    I’m holding out hope that things appear worse than they are. Because the key isn’t how much offshore drilling is allowed. The crucial issue is whether oil and gas companies decide it’s worth their money to go out, find, and retreive the stuff. And things could be brighter on that front, because, as Joe Romm explains, the payoff in these reserves may not be worth the trouble. (Nobody knows precisely how much oil and gas are in these places.) GOP politicians like John McCain and Sarah Palin have used offshore drilling as a rallying cry, but energy companies need to keep clear heads, crunch the numbers, and decide if a given project pays.

    A few more notes…

    On gas prices and your money:

    Not much will change for a long time—estimates figure that new oil won’t be available for 10 to 12 years, with peak production coming several years beyond that.

    On foreign oil, energy independence, and bankrolling violent extremism:

    Not much will change for a long time—again, the new oil won’t be available for years.

    On the West Coast:

    Dunno what’s going on here. No mention of it. [Update: The Pacific coast gets no mention because the drilling ban there remains in place.]

    On the politics:

    This is supposed to win support for a climate/clean-energy bill from wavering Senate Republicans. Obama compromises, they compromise—that’s the hope. But Republican lawmakers have shown very little interest in compromising on legislation in the Obama era.

    So the big question is whether Democrats have gotten GOP senators to commit to supporting a bill. Did this win a few crucial votes, or is it a giveway for nothing? No one seems to know yet. No public vote commitments, at least.

    The early reaction:

    On the DailyKos comment thread, it’s mostly frustration with the apparent giveaway. “There’s no real level on which this is anything but pandering,” writes one commenter. “We need more oil like we need a hole in the head. In the ten years it takes to get it to market we could have renewables. Enough subsidies for big oil.”

    The reporting:

    The substances at issue here—oil and natural gas—will eventually be burned, releasing heat-trapping pollutants that cause global warming. If that continues unchecked, it could be the most destructive and unjust phenomena of the coming century. There’s no mention of any of this in the stories from major news outlets. Just sayin,