Energy Matters – Page 71

Category: Energy Matters

The twentieth century way of life has been made available, largely due to the miracle of cheap energy. The price of energy has been at record lows for the past century and a half.As oil becomes increasingly scarce, it is becoming obvious to everyone, that the rapid economic and industrial growth we have enjoyed for that time is not sustainable.Now, the hunt is on. For renewable sources of energy, for alternative sources of energy, for a way of life that is less dependent on cheap energy.Â

Government trips over own policy

The two major climate policies – the RET and Emissions Trading Scheme (EST) – are both likely to be held up in the Senate.

And it’s a problem for households who want to go solar.

The government last week axed its $8,000 rebate for solar panels. A new, smaller rebate will not start until the RET laws have passed parliament.

The government had planned for that to happen next week, but the coalition, Family First senator Steve Fielding and independent Nick Xenophon scotched that plan in the Senate.

Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, warned that hundreds of workers could be immediately laid off as a result.

“Clean energy companies around Australia will now put hiring plans on hold and in some cases be forced to start shedding staff,” he said.

Mr Warren said the RET laws should have been passed a year ago.

The government promised the RET – 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020 – before the last election.

But the laws were only tabled in parliament on Wednesday.

And the government has linked the RET to the already embattled ETS.

Adding to the controversy is the fact that the government changed the solar rebate twice in a year before axing it, only to replace it with a third rebate.

Senator Wong attacked the coalition for delaying action on global warming. She defended the decision to end the old rebate.

“It was the fiscally responsible thing to do,” Senator Wong said.

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said it was the government’s fault the RET laws were not ready.

“This legislation is a year late,” he said.

The vote has been delayed so a Senate committee can hold an inquiry into the laws by August 12. Mr Hunt said scrutiny was needed.

Greens climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne said there was no excuse for another delay in the RET.

Compounding the climate headache for the government is the prospect of a lengthy debate on emissions trading next week.

There is speculation the coalition will stretch out the debate late into the night to avoid a vote.

Parliament breaks for winter at the end of next week.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said filibustering on the debate was not leadership, it was opportunism.

“Not having the courage to vote for climate change is one thing, not having the courage to allow any vote on climate change, that’s something else.”

21 June, 2009

US bill to build green business

From Renewable Energy World

“Without a program to support our own domestic manufacturers, policies that create new demand for clean energy will just lead to more imports,” said Angelides. “It is critical that Congress enact legislation that provides direct and substantial investment in clean energy component manufacturing to ensure that jobs are created in the U.S.”

The IMPACT Act would provide resources for small- and medium-sized manufacturers through a 2-year, $30 billion manufacturing revolving loan fund, which will provide much needed liquidity for domestic manufacturers to improve manufacturing processes and to retool and expand production of clean energy products. The Apollo Alliance estimates that, once enacted, the bill will create 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs and nearly 2 million indirect jobs over five years.

“We can revive American manufacturing through investment in clean energy,” said Senator Brown. “This bill will help our manufacturers retool, put our auto suppliers back to work, and produce clean energy technologies.”

Brown’s legislation would also expand and focus Manufacturing Extension Partnerships (MEPs) on clean energy manufacturing. Under Brown’s legislation, the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a division of the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, would receive $1.5 billion in federal funds over five years to help manufacturers access clean energy markets and adopt innovative, energy-efficient manufacturing technologies.

“The only way to put our existing manufacturing sector to work, and to scale up to meet the new demand created by the cap and trade program, is to have a dedicated source of funding for investments in component manufacturing,” said Angelides.

In April, Apollo Alliance released its Green Manufacturing Action Plan (GreenMAP), which detailed aggressive steps to scale up production of American-made clean energy systems and components while making U.S. factories more energy efficient. Developed in collaboration with industry, labor, environmental groups, and academic experts, the Apollo GreenMAP called for direct federal funding for clean energy manufacturers to retool facilities and retrain workers to develop, produce and commercialize clean energy technologies.

21 June, 2009

Investors shun North Sea despite rebounding oil prices

“Businesses have already found 2009 a turbulent, tough year and the UK offshore oil and gas industry is no more immune to these pressures than the rest of the economy,” Oil & Gas UK said in a statement.

“There is growing concern that the rapid fall in oil prices and the freezing of capital markets will impair investment and suppress production in the North Sea, with wider implications for companies and employment across the supply chain.”

Oil prices, despite a solid rally in recent months, languish more than 50 percent beneath record highs that were struck one year ago.

“Even the short term, recovery in oil prices of the last two or three months is way too early to positively impact people’s decision (to invest) in the long term,” Bob Keiller, chief executive of energy industry services provider PSN, told AFP on the sidelines of the conference.

“The volatility (of oil prices) has affected the confidence in investments,” added Keiller.

Widely-traded Brent North Sea crude oil currently stands at about 70 dollars a barrel, more than double its level in December when the sharp global recession severely dented demand for energy.

Prices however remain more than half their level of July 2008 when fears about supply disruptions had sent them rocketing to record highs above 147 dollars.

According to Oil & Gas UK, expenditure on North Sea exploration was down 70 percent at the start of 2009 compared to a year earlier.

Investment which totalled five billion pounds (5.9 billion euros, 8.1 billion dollars) in 2008 could fall to 2.5 billion pounds this year, the industry body said.

Despite the recent rally in oil futures, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries argues that the current prices is preventing investment in fresh exploration projects worldwide.

Malcolm Webb, president of Oil & Gas UK, noted that erosion in capital expenditure for North Sea exploration had begun in 2006, when oil prices were far below current levels.

In a sign of the bad times for the industry, the British government has postponed indefinitely the sale of North Sea exploration sites.

“Investing in the future is not easy in the current environment,” said Bernard Looney, managing director of oil giant BP’s North Sea business.

“Our statistical review shows that UK (oil) production has dropped 38 percent since 2000 to 2008. When I listen to people discuss what I call the seductive run up in oil price, I am worried that this is masking a much less talked about fact — gas prices.

“They continue to fall. When you assume that 50 percent of North Sea production is gas, the average North Sea realisation today is still around 40 dollars per barrel of oil equivalent.”

Multinationals eye up Lithium reserves beneath Bolivia’s salt flats.

But that may be about to change. Dig down and you find brine – water saturated with salt – rich in deposits of lithium, the lightest metal.

As the invention of the pneumatic tyre turned rubber into a precious commodity in the 19th century, the world’s tilt towards greener energy is expected to do the same for lithium in the 21st. For years, tiny amounts have been used in laptops, BlackBerrys and other devices, but now its main use is expected to be in batteries for electric cars, which campaigners, manufacturers and governments say will – or should – replace petrol and diesel vehicles.

For Bolivia, this is good news. It is thought to possess 5.4m tonnes of lithium, half the world’s supply. “Lithium is very important for us and the world,” Bolivia’s mining and metallurgy minister, Luis Alberto Echazú, said. “We hope to extract 1,200 tonnes next year and that’s just the beginning. When we’re up and running we’ll be producing 10, 15 times that.”

Four wells have been dug in Salar de Uyuni and a state-run pilot plant is being built near the village of Rio Grande on the fringe of the desert.

But there is a problem. Bolivia’s socialist government has a habit of clashing with foreign multinationals in other sectors and has not clinched a deal – and, according to some, may never seal one – with the investors needed to extract significant quantities of lithium.

Foreign companies are afraid to deal with a government that confiscates assets and rips up contracts, said Carlos Alberto López, a former energy minister and consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “Bolivia’s ideological face does not square with business and commercial realities. I doubt lithium’s potential will be realised in the short or medium term.” Pessimists fear a fiasco: carmakers lacking batteries to power electric vehicles and Bolivia, one of the continent’s poorest countries, losing an opportunity to develop. President Evo Morales, a former llama herder and trade union leader, has a different fear: that western multinationals will suck the wealth of Salar de Uyuni like capitalist vampires. Morales swept to power in 2005 promising to end 500 years of plunder. Lithium is a test case. “The government of Bolivia will never give away control of this natural resource,” he said. He acknowledges, however, that a foreign partner is needed.

The government is talking to France’s Bollore Group, South Korea’s LG Group and Japan’s Sumitomo and Mitsubishi. Bollore has been asked to join the government’s scientific commission on lithium, suggesting it has the edge.

The government said it would choose as a partner the company which will help Bolivian industry and not just mining. The idea is to process and add value to the lithium after it is extracted, for instance by making batteries or even fleets of electric cars in the impoverished country. The $6m (£3.6m) state-run pilot plant near Rio Grande is the first step. At the end of a dirt track dozens of workers are building barracks to house technicians and miners. Over a generator’s hum Marcelo Castro, 48, the site manager, exuded patriotic pride. “We are building everything from scratch. This is a historic moment. We are working for ourselves.” Rich countries would no longer plunder Bolivia’s resources. “There is a new dialectic.”

Sceptics say that is delirium. Work at the pilot plant has proved slow, talks with multinationals remain inconclusive and there is no production timetable.

The 2006 nationalisation of the oil and gas industry is a troubling precedent. Foreign investment evaporated, production fell and the state-owned energy company, YPFB, became mired in corruption. “The trustworthiness of the Bolivian state has come into question,” said López, “and I don’t think investors will expose themselves to being hammered on the head.”

Time will tell. With a lithium shortage forecast for 2015, Bolivia may also have the upper hand. “We have had bad experiences in the past,” said Paulino Colque, leader of an indigenous workers’ group Uyuni. “If there are any investors that want to come, they can come – but as partners, not patrons.”

Running on lithium

Lithium ion batteries, first proposed in the 1970s but not commercialised until 20 years later, are the technology most likely in the short-term to make the clean electricity dream viable. Several times lighter than current rechargeable batteries (usually made from nickel compounds) and with a better performance and longer lifetime, Li-ion cells have already been developed for laptops and mobile phones. Now they face their biggest challenge. For cars, they will have to be more powerful, more reliable and – a big sticking point – far cheaper. Most experimental electric vehicles today use some form of Li-ion batteries and many experts agree the technology is ready for the first generation of electric vehicles. The other big hurdle is size: the batteries are still too big. Alok Jha

Carbon capture plans threaten shutdown of all UK coal-fired power stations.

A spokeswoman said that no decision had yet been made. The government could instead decide to allow coal plants still open in 2020 to operate for a limited period or to keep them in reserve to stop the lights going out.

A spokesman for a company operating several coal plants in the UK said that even if Miliband did not carry out his threat and force existing coal plants to fit expensive CCS equipment, any further restrictions on their operation would be likely to result in their closure. It will probably prove too difficult and expensive to fit CCS to plants nearing the end of their lifespan.

Drax is the UK’s newest and biggest coal-fired station. The Yorkshire plant, which provides about 8 per cent of Britain’s electricity, is technically able to continue to operate into the 2030s. But since it is 40 miles from the coast, transporting captured carbon for storage in the North Sea would be particularly difficult.

Dorothy Thompson, chief executive of Drax, accepted that the plant might eventually need to fit CCS but did not say when this would be feasible or economic.

David Porter, head of trade body the Association of Electricity Producers, said he welcomed CCS as a way of making coal plants environmentally acceptable, but said existing stations which could not fit the equipment should not be forced to close. “There are already quite enough coal-fired plants coming off the system. Security of supply should be taken seriously,” he warned.

The Guardian has also learnt that E.ON’s controversial plans to build a new coal-fired station in Kingsnorth – the first in the UK for more than 20 years – are likely to be delayed by several years at least. It would represent a temporary victory for environmental campaigners, who staged last summer’s climate camp near the Kent site. The Kingsnorth plans could be scrapped altogether.

E.ON has entered the new station into a government competition to build the first commercial-scale CCS demonstration project. DECC has now admitted that the decision to pick a winner has been delayed and will not take place until the autumn of 2010 at the earliest. Miliband reiterated the government’s ambition to have the winning project operational in 2014.

E.ON is becoming increasingly concerned about the tight schedule of four years to build its first highly efficient coal plant in the UK which is also equipped with experimental CCS technology. The delay in the competition could favour Scottish Power’s entry at Longannet, which involves attaching CCS to an existing coal station.

Miliband told the Guardian that the short space of time for E.ON to build a new plant was “one of the factors” which would influence the decision but declined to comment further.

Paul Golby, E.ON’s chief executive, has admitted the firm would not build Kingsnorth if it did not win the competition. Under Miliband’s plans announced in April, all new coal plants must fit CCS to part of the operation. Golby said it would not be economic to do this without government subsidies and added that E.ON could build a gas plant instead.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, urged the government to make all existing coal plants fit CCS: “If we fail to act, Drax will remain one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide in the world for decades,” he said. “The government’s own advisors on climate change have stated that all emissions from coal must cease by the early 2020s.

“That’s all coal, not just new coal, so it’s vital that Ed Miliband’s new policy doesn’t ignore the inconvenient truth that we need to deal with the reality of Drax every bit as urgently as the threat of Kingsnorth.”

$200m wind farm planned for Shannon’s flat

Managing director Gerry McGowan says regulatory approvals could take two years at a cost of about $2 million.

But he says the construction of 20 turbines would only take about six months.

Mr McGowan says the project has a lot of potential.

“We have a belief that the New South Wales grid is conducive to more renewables being placed on it,” he said.

“We think that whilst a lot of wind had been going into places like Tasmania and South Australia, we think New South Wales over the next few years will develop good wind sites and good wind resources.

“We’ve got a grid that can cope with the introduction of wind power into it.”

The company is expected to lodge the first part of a staged development application with the New South Wales Planning Department soon.

“It’s going to be submitted in a series of applications because there are environmental issues and forestry issues, so that will take place over a couple of years,” Mr McGowan said.

“With any wind farm you need to do a certain amount of clearing around the site. The site is fairly clear but we’ll be applying for a small amount of tree removal if we can.

“If not, it’s not totally necessary for this particular site but it will get the output of the site up if we can remove some trees and replace them elsewhere.”

CBD Energy – whose chairman is former deputy prime minister Mark Vaile – is also involved in wind farm projects in New Zealand and is working with Hydro Tasmania on a solar development on King Island.