Severe weather forces campaigners to give up their perilous position on British-owned rig off the coast of Greenland
Four Greenpeace activists who halted drilling by a British-owned oil exploration rig off Greenland have been arrested after they abandoned their occupation because of severe weather.
Greenlandic police arrested the four after high winds buffeted the Stena Don drilling rig overnight, forcing them to abandon mountaineering-style platforms they had suspended by ropes underneath the platform less than 48 hours earlier.
Their retreat is a setback for Greenpeace, which believed a longer-term occupation of the rig would be a serious blow to attempts by the Edinburgh-based exploration firm Cairn Energy to strike oil or gas before the intense Arctic winter sets in.
However, sources in the region had predicted when the four protesters clambered on to the platform at dawn on Tuesday that severe weather forecast for early this morning would cut short their occupation.
Greenpeace has warned that if Cairn strikes oil or gas, it will provoke an "oil rush" in the vulnerable and unspoilt waters of the Arctic as the world's largest oil firms exploit one of the world's largest untapped reserves.
Cairn Energy said drilling had resumed as soon as the four were arrested. Industry experts had denied the campaigners' claims that a delay of four or five days would have seriously damaged the drilling operation; the company had built delays and unscheduled stoppages into its schedule.
The four are now expected to be prosecuted by Greenlandic police, but Greenpeace said said it would now widen its campaign against deep sea drilling by taking the British government to court.
The group has sent the government a "letter before action", accusing ministers of issuing new licenses for deep sea drilling in British waters before they had found out exactly what caused the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
John Sauven, Greenpeace UK's executive director, said: "Our climbers have stopped this rig from drilling in the fragile Arctic for two days, and this is just the start of a long campaign. The world needs to go beyond oil, but here in the UK the government is waving through applications for new drilling as if the Deepwater Horizon explosion never happened.
"The Gulf of Mexico disaster was a game changer, so ministers should suspend new deep water licences and companies like Cairn Energy must stop dangerous drilling in the Arctic and start investing in clean alternatives instead."
Social networking site under fire over intention to run giant new data centre mainly on coal-powered electricity
Social networking website Facebook is coming under unprecedented pressure from its users to switch to renewable energy. In one of the web's fastest-growing environmental campaigns, Greenpeace international says at least 500,000 people have now protested at the organisation's intention to run its giant new data centre mainly on electricity produced by burning coal power.
Facebook will not say how much electricity it uses to stream video, store information and connect its 500m users but industry estimates suggest that at their present rate of growth all the data centres and telecommunication networks in the world will consume about 1,963bn kilowatt hours of electricity by 2020. That is more than triple their current consumption and more electricity than is used by France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.
Facebook announced in February that it planned to build what is expected to be the world's largest centralised data storage centres in Portland, Oregon. Although it will include some of the world's most energy-efficient computers, the sheer scale of the Facebook operation will almost certainly use more electricity than many developing countries.
The company has said it will source its electricity from Pacific Power. It uses coal power – the dirtiest form of power generation – for 67% of its electricity, and produces less than 12% of its electricity from renewable sources. The company has said it plans to generate more electricity from renewables in future but has given no detailed information.
In a statement Facebook said: "It is true that the local utility for the region we chose, Pacific Power, has an energy mix that is weighted slightly more toward coal than the national average. However, the efficiency we are able to achieve because of the climate of the region and the reduced energy usage that results minimises our overall carbon footprint.
"Said differently, if we located the data centre most other places, we would need mechanical chillers, use more energy, and be responsible for more overall carbon in the air – even if that location was fuelled by more renewable energy."
Kumi Naidoo, director of Greenpeace International, urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to commit his company to a plan to phase out the use of dirty coal-fired electricity. In a letter to Facebook, Naidoo said: "Facebook is uniquely positioned to be a truly visible and influential leader to drive the deployment of clean energy."
Earlier this year Greenpeace admitted that many of its own web hosting operations are also housed in data centres powered primarily by coal and nuclear power. The environmental group said it offset all the energy used to power its main website in Amsterdam and used renewable energy where it could. Many of its servers in Washington also used wind power.
Instead of spending taxpayers' money propping up factory farms, UK government should support planet-friendly farming
• Guardian campaign Biodiversity 100
• Tell us how governments should halt biodiversity loss
Mankind has a problem. We're heating the Earth and destroying its ecosystems so fast that we're killing off life as we know it. The fragile world around us, from rainforest canopies to marine life in our oceans, is the life support system we all depend on – for food, for shelter, for clean air. But we're trashing it, quickly, many habitats at a time, and putting ourselves in grave danger within our lifetimes.
The overriding challenge of our generation is to protect the world around us – there is no planet B. We must halt biodiversity loss before it is too late and precious species go for good. Reducing our ecological footprint goes hand in hand with tackling climate change. It means putting the breaks on our damaging consumption habits and living fairly within our environmental limits – making wiser use of resources and clean energy.
The Guardian's Biodiversity 100 campaign is one way of saying enough's enough. Taking collective action to ask governments to protect ecosystems is the best way of getting our voices heard. National targets for protecting biodiversity have been missed year after year, but the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan this October is a chance to put that right – and it's up to all of us to hold world leaders to account.
Yes it's an international problem and yes every nation can help solve it, but it's only fair that rich countries take the lead. We can't criticise others until our own house is in order – and the UK has a lot to put right. Friends of the Earth's 2008 report What's feeding our food? revealed an unsavoury truth: rainforests and wildlife in South America are being destroyed to make way for vast soy plantations to grow animal feed for Britain's factory farms. The very sausage on your barbecue or burger in your bun is costing forest habitats – it's enough to leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
Many unique ecosystems like the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado grasslands in South America are being decimated by soy farming and cattle ranching. The Atlantic Forest, which runs along the eastern coast of Brazil and inland to Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay, is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. It is home to around 8,000 unique plant species and more than 20 critically endangered species including the white-collared kite, and black-faced lion tamarin. 92 per cent of its amphibians are unique to the area. It's shocking that agricultural activity here has shrunk the forest to less than a tenth of its original size, as trees have been cleared to make way for ranches and soy plantations, and small farmers pushed deeper into the forests. Worrying too, that in 2010, the region of Brazil containing the remaining Atlantic Forest showed the biggest increase in soy plantations in the whole country.
Rainforest and wildlife in South East Asia are also being lost – this time in the EU's drive for biofuels. But biofuels are far from the green energy solution big business says they are. The habitats of the orangutan and Sumatran tiger are being trashed in Malaysia and Indonesia to make way for biofuel crop, and in 2008 the UN estimated that if logging rates continue, virtually all rainforest there will be destroyed by 2013. Worse still, Friends of the Earth research in 2009 revealed that biofuels could even be contributing more carbon emissions than the fossil fuels they replace, equivalent to putting half a million extra cars on the roads.
To stop this habitat destruction – and the additional atmospheric carbon that is exacerbating climate change – there needs to be some urgent rethinking. The good news is we know the solutions – but now we must use them. Instead of spending taxpayers' money propping up factory farms, the UK government should be backing planet-friendly farming. Friends of the Earth's recent Pastures New report shows that half of the animal feed imported to the UK could be replaced with home-grown alternatives – saving an area of forest the size of the Yorkshire Dales every year. More than 40,000 people have backed our campaign so far – and we've got a Sustainable Livestock Bill in parliament as a result. If successful it will overhaul UK farming, benefiting both farmers in Britain and biodiversity here and abroad – so we're urging MPs to back it.
Similarly the EU's target to fuel 10% of road transport with biofuels by 2020 is impossible to reach sustainably – the expansion of plantations for biofuel crops such as palm oil is the main driver of deforestation in south-east Asia. The UK should drop its share and promote greener alternatives to driving instead. More than half of UK car journeys are less than five miles long and many of these could be completed by other means. The government should fund local schemes that get people walking, cycling and using the bus, and make rail a cheaper and more convenient option for longer trips.
2010 is the UN year of biodiversity, but the world's species and habitats are millennia old. If we fail to take bold action to protect the colourful diversity of life on Earth, for the sake of the world's people and future generations, the world will not only be greyer, but life-threatening for us and future generations.
Greenpeace's occupation of an Arctic rig carries a simple message: stop drilling for fossil fuels
Ten days ago I received a letter from Cairn Energy, the British company at the centre of Greenpeace's current direct action in the Arctic. I was told that its drilling operation is "relatively straightforward" and that the blue whales, polar bears and kittiwakes in Baffin Bay are safe, because, according to Cairn, "our programme is conventional".
This industry has lost its grip on reality. Anyone who has seen the remarkable images coming from the Arctic over the last few days will know how unusual, dangerous and extreme this business has become. While icebergs the size of football stadiums are towed out of a rig's path, ships equipped with high-pressure water cannons blast smaller chunks into submission. And all the while the clock is ticking. As the winter freeze edges nearer, this frantic exploration company rushes to finish the job before sheet-ice cuts off the region completely.
One hundred and fifty years since the first oil well was drilled in the US, this industry has reached the end of the line. The Arctic is said to contain about 90bn barrels of recoverable oil, which is enough to keep the thirsty world going for oh, three or four years. As climate change warms the icy seas, more areas become accessible to drilling. As this oil is extracted and burned, the warming accelerates and more companies pile in. A neat circle, but one that risks engulfing us all.
Climate change is a clear and present danger, and a series of brutal "weather events" this year should serve as the final warning. We are careful to point out that no single flood, storm or drought can be blamed on climate change, but the trend is getting hard to ignore. We are faced with a choice: act with real urgency to move away from fossil fuels and develop the clean tools that will help us completely rebuild our economic system, or carry on squeezing out the last drops and hope for the best.
Cairn Energy is betting on the status quo. Its letter informs me that the company is basing its plans on an International Energy Agency report which suggests that, by 2030, fossil fuels will still supply about 80% of the world's energy. What it doesn't say is that this "scenario" – the most pessimistic of several the IEA has produced – could lead to six degrees of warming by the end of the century.
Six degrees sounds manageable. It is not. These companies are relying on us to keep quiet while they take humanity to the brink. Our climbers are on that rig with a simple message: Go beyond oil.
Kuupik Kleist claims environmental campaigners are damaging country's economy by occupy drilling platform
The premier of Greenland has accused Greenpeace of threatening the safety of oil workers and the environment after four activists forced a controversial deep sea exploration rig in the Arctic to shut down today.
Just before dawn, the four campaigners used three high-speed inflatable boats to evade the Danish navy, before clambering on to the British-owned rig and slinging mountaineering-type platforms underneath the rig about 15m above the sea. The raid forced the Edinburgh-based oil exploration firm Cairn Energy to suspend drilling, escalating tensions between the Greenlandic government and Greenpeace.
Kuupik Kleist, the government's socialist prime minister, denounced the campaigners' actions, claiming they were damaging the recently independent country's economy and ignoring the strict environmental and safety regulations Greenland had imposed on oil companies.
"This is clearly an illegal act, ignoring the rules of democracy," he said, in a statement. "The cabinet regards Greenpeace's action as very serious and an illegal attack on the country's constitutional rights. It is worrying that Greenpeace, in their hunt for media exposure, violate security rules made to protect human lives and the environment."
The Greenpeace action follows a standoff between the campaigners' ship Esperanza and an armed Danish frigate and Greenland police vessels in Baffin Bay east of Greenland, where Cairn Energy is hoping to uncover major new reserves of oil or gas.
For the last nine days, the Esperanza has been closely shadowed by the frigate and Danish commandos while it circled a 500m exclusion zone around the rig, waiting for the chance to launch its direct action.
Cairn, which is drilling in an area known as "iceberg alley", announced last week it had detected gas in a shallow sands and prompted alarm among environmentalists.
Campaigners warn this will lead to a dangerous rush to exploit one of the world's last major untapped oil and gas fields in one of the planet's most fragile locations. Greenpeace has described the site as a key battleground in the climate change campaign.
The US Geological Survey estimated last year that there may be 90bn barrels of oil and 50tn cubic metres of gas across the Arctic. Several multinational oil companies, including Exxon, Chevron and Shell, are waiting for permission from Greenland to begin deep sea drilling around its coast.
Sim McKenna, a US Greenpeace campaigner and one of the four activists occupying the platform, said Greenland and Cairn were being "reckless" with a fragile and pristine environment. "We intend to stay here for as long as possible and as long as necessary to stop this reckless drilling," he said.
"The BP Gulf oil disaster showed us it's time to go beyond oil. The drilling rig we're hanging off could spark an Arctic oil rush, one that would pose a huge threat to the climate and put this fragile environment at risk."
Greenpeace hopes it will be able to occupy the platform until the end of the week. It hopes a long delay before drilling resumes will prevent Cairn from striking oil or gas before the intense Arctic winter sets in, forcing a halt to the exploration effort.
The activists have food for several days, and are wearing Arctic survival suits against the freezing temperatures, but are precariously tied to the underside of the rig. Sources in the area said winds of up to 50mph were forecast were forecast for Thursday.
Morten Neilsen, deputy police chief for Greenland, said rescue vessels were standing by in case any of the climbers fell. He said all four would be arrested and prosecuted, but he refused to say whether they would be forcibly removed. "What we intend to do, how and when, is an operational detail it wouldn't be smart to advise Greenpeace about," he said.
Cairn Energy argues that Greenpeace has exaggerated the significance of its exploration and its risks. There are two major oil and gas fields already in the Arctic, at Sakhalin in eastern Russia and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, providing 10% of the world's oil.
Greenpeace argues that deep sea Arctic drilling is extremely perilous because of the sea ice and intense weather conditions in the region. It believes the risks posed by this operation go "far beyond" the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the Arctic an oil spill would destroy the region's vulnerable and as yet untouched habitats, while the cold water would prevent any oil from quickly breaking down. Any emergency operation to tackle a disaster would encounter huge technical and logistical problems in such a remote area.
Big News biogas fans. Via Green Car Congress, we learn that a Colorado State University professor is developing an anaerobic digester, which uses much less water than conventional technology. A CSU press release claims this process for turning animal waste into methane is more economically feasible and easier for feedlots and dairies in Western states to start doing.
Similar Posts:Sharvelle’s system separates the digestion process into two major steps. Water is trickled over dry waste in a vessel to capture organic materials and convert nearly 60% of the solid material into liquid organic acids. The liquid is put into another reactor which is heated to incubate the bacteria living in the digester. These bacteria then convert waste into methane.
That separation of processes also assists Western farming and ranching operations that must contend with rocks and sand in the waste when they scrape it from their lots. These materials are detrimental to operation of conventional anaerobic digestion technology. With Sharvelle’s system, remaining solids from the hydrolysis step are separated and can be composted.
Environmental campaigners slip through security boats to scale Cairn Energy oil rig in dawn raid
Greenpeace claims to have shut down offshore drilling by a British oil company at a controversial site in the Arctic after four climbers began an occupation of the rig just after dawn.
The environment campaigners said the four protesters evaded a small flotilla of armed Danish navy and police boats which have been guarding the rigs in Baffin Bay off Greenland since the Greenpeace protest ship Esperanza arrived last week.
The rigs are operated by the Edinburgh-based oil exploration company Cairn Energy, which last week prompted world-wide alarm among environmentalists after disclosing it had found the first evidence of oil or gas deposits under the Arctic.
Several multinational oil companies, including Exxon. Chevron and Shell, are waiting for permission from Greenland to begin deep sea drilling in the Arctic's pristine waters.
Campaigners claim this led to a dangerous rush to exploit one of the world's last major untapped reserves in one of its most fragile locations. The US Geological Survey last year estimated there may be 90bn barrels of oil and 50tn cubic metres of gas across the Arctic.
The campaign group said: "At dawn this morning our expert climbers in inflatable speed boats dodged Danish Navy commandos before climbing up the inside of the rig and hanging from it in tents suspended from ropes, halting its drilling operation.
"The climbers have enough supplies to occupy the hanging tents for several days. If they succeed in stopping drilling for just a short time then the operators, Britain's Cairn Energy, will struggle to meet a tight deadline to complete the exploration before winter ice conditions force it to abandon the search for oil off Greenland until next year."
The occupation comes after a nine-day stand-off between Greenpeace and the Danish navy, which has sent its frigate Vaedderen to the area, deploying elite Danish commandos on high-speed boats to patrol a 500m exclusion zone around the rigs.
Last week the Danes warned the Esperanza it would be forcibly boarded and its captain arrested if it breached the security zone. After Greenpeace launched its helicopter to take photographs, the security area was extended to include a 1,800m high air exclusion zone.
Greenpeace argues that the Arctic drilling programme is extremely perilous because of the sea ice and intense weather conditions in the region, and claims it is one of the 10 most dangerous drilling sites in the world. The Baffin Bay area is known as "iceberg alley". Last week, it filmed a support vessel trying to break up an iceberg using high pressure hoses.
It says the risks posed by this operation go "far beyond" the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; in the Arctic an oil spill would destroy the region's vulnerable and untouched habitats, while the cold water would prevent any oil from quickly breaking up. Any emergency operation to tackle a disaster would encounter huge technical and logistical problems in such a remote area.
Cairn Energy was targeted by climate protesters who occupied the grounds of the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters near Edinburgh last week. Cairn's offices in the city centre were smeared with molasses to symbolise oil.
The company argues it is there at Greenland's invitation, to help bolster and strengthen the island's economy. It also insisted its drilling operations obeyed some of the world's strictest environmental and safety regulations. "We've put procedures in place to give the highest possible priority to safety and environmental protection," it said.
It emerged last week that BP had withdrawn from applying to join in the Greenland oil exploration programme, a direct consequence of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Sim McKenna, one of the Greenpeace climbers on board the Cairn rig, said: "We've got to keep the energy companies out of the Arctic and kick our addiction to oil, that's why we're going to stop this rig from drilling for as long as we can.
"The BP Gulf oil disaster showed us it's time to go beyond oil. The drilling rig we're hanging off could spark an Arctic oil rush, one that would pose a huge threat to the climate and put this fragile environment at risk."
Morten Nielsen, deputy head of Greenland police, said the four protesters would be arrested and prosecuted. "The position of the Greenlandic police is that this is a clear violation of the law, the penal code of Greenland. The perpetrators will be prosecuted by the Greenlandic authorities," he said.
"But what we intend to do, how and when, is an operational detail it wouldn't be smart to advise Greenpeace about."
Speaking from the island's capital, Nuuk, Nielsen confirmed that the police had rescue vessels close by the protesters in case any fell into the water, which was only a few degrees above freezing. He denied the police and navy had been outwitted by the protesters setting off at dawn.
"We have to evaluate the downside of any interception," he said. "The highest value we have to preserve is life and if the result of intercepting the Greenpeace activists would bring the police or for that matter the activists' lives in jeopardy, we are not going to intercept right now."
The world is on the brink of a nuclear power renaissance, say scientists. From SciDev.net, part of the Guardian Environment Network
The world is on the brink of a nuclear power renaissance, and developing countries may also benefit, according to researchers.
In a study published in Science this month (12 August) British researchers outlined a vision for flexible and more user-friendly nuclear technologies, as worries over the climate change, energy supply security, and depletion of fossil fuels, are overturning decades of hesitancy over the safety of nuclear power plants.
Robin Grimes, materials researchers at Imperial College London and William Nuttall, senior lecturer in technology policy at the University of Cambridge, believe nuclear power will become viable for energy production in developing countries post-2030. "Outside currently established nuclear countries, flexible nuclear technologies will be especially attractive, reducing the need for grid infrastructure," Grimes told SciDev.Net.
The authors envisage ship-borne power plants providing energy to big cities, requiring less grid infrastructure and making it easier to invest in cost-effective nuclear energy from scratch.
Grimes also suggested 'fuelled-for-life core reactors' — fully sealed modular reactors that could last 40 years and remove fuel handling from the energy production process. These would also reduce workers' exposure to radiation, reducing the need for expensive monitoring.
Another idea is to develop reactors with replaceable parts to extend their 40–50 year life span, so that investment in reactors was more cost effective.
Technologies now under development could mean 'fast reactors' using uranium 15 times more efficiently than at present. They could become available by 2030, reducing the cost of raw materials.
But any country, developing or not, must show both an "economic need for nuclear energy" and "a clearly independent nuclear regulatory body that has access to the necessary facilities and the people to carry out its work," Grimes told SciDev.Net.
Safety and nuclear proliferation criteria as laid down by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty would need to be met, as well as compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency, standards.
If these criteria are met, reducing reliance on grid infrastructure is a key point for developing countries wishing to join the predicted renaissance, as it keeps costs low, Grimes said.
But some experts are doubtful. Referring to solar energy, John Finney, chair of the British Pugwash Group but speaking in a personal capacity, said that other options such as solar power might also suit developing countries.
Bob van der Zwaan, senior scientist at the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands said that nuclear energy was not a silver bullet, but could address climate change, pollution, and energy dependency problems "along with other options such as renewable".
Charity predicts more food shortages in Africa because of EU target to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020
European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).
In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.
FoE has added its voice to an NGO lobby that claims local communities are not properly consulted and that forests are being cleared in a pattern that echoes decades of exploitation of other natural resources in Africa.
In its report "Africa: Up for Grabs", the group says that the key to halting the land-grab is for EU countries to drop a goal to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020.
"The amount of land being taken in Africa to meet Europe's increasing demand for biofuels is underestimated and out of control," Kirtana Chandrasekaran, food campaigner for FoE in the UK, said. "Especially in Africa, as long as there's massive demand for biofuels from the European market, it will be hard to control. If we implement the biofuels targets it will only get worse. This is just a small taste of what's to come."
A number of European companies have planted biofuel crops such as jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil in Africa and elsewhere to tap into rising demand. But the trend has coincided with soaring food prices and ignited a debate over the dangers of using agricultural land for fuel.
Producers argue they typically farm land not destined, or suitable for, food crops. But campaigners reject those claims, with FoE saying that biofuel crops, including non-edible ones such as jatropha, "are competing directly with food crops for fertile land".
ActionAid claimed this year that European biofuel targets could result in up to 100 million more hungry people, increased food prices and landlessness.
Natural disasters including floods in Pakistan and a heatwave in Russia have wiped out crops in recent weeks and intensified fears of widespread food shortages.
The United Nations has singled out biofuel demand as a factor in what it estimates will be as much as a 40% jump in food prices over the coming decade.
Estimates of how much land in Africa is being farmed by foreign companies and governments, either for food or fuel crops, vary significantly. The FoE report focuses on 11 African countries in what it sees as a rush by foreign companies to farm there. In Tanzania, for example, it says that about 40 foreign-owned companies, including some from the UK, have invested in agrofuel developments. It argues that such activities are actually raising carbon emissions in many cases because virgin forests are being cut down.
Lip service
The report concludes: "While foreign companies pay lip service to the need for 'sustainable development', agrofuel production and demand for land is resulting in the loss of pasture and forests, destroying natural habitat and probably causing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions."Sun Biofuels, a British company farming land in Mozambique and Tanzania and named in the report, criticised the charity's research as "emotional and anecdotal" and said that its time would be better spent looking into ways to develop equitable farming models in Africa.
Sun's chief executive, Richard Morgan, said his company's leasing of land in Tanzania had taken three years, during which 11 communities, comprising about 11,000 people, were consulted.
"I find it insulting from Friends of the Earth. Somehow it's indirect criticism of Mozambiquan and Tanzanian governments that they would allow this dispossession to take place," he said.
Morgan conceded that such a protracted process could raise expectations among local people of jobs and investment that could not be met, and said that it was often those negative testimonies that were collected by newspapers and NGOs. But he insisted that Sun was creating jobs where possible and that much of the biofuel production was destined for domestic markets in Africa rather than Europe.
"There's an opportunity here to get investment into local communities in an ethical way," he said.
In many cases, biofuel production was replacing or reducing illegal tree felling, Morgan added. "Tanzania has a large landless community felling forest land. If you give employment to those people as an alternative, there is a chance you can intervene commercially there in a good way."
Biofuel crops were being grown on land that was not intended for food production, he said: "Often we are growing trees on land already cut down for charcoal or in some cases tobacco. We haven't displaced anyone."
But FoE argues that "most of the foreign companies are developing agrofuels to sell on the international market". Its campaigners in Africa are demanding that African states should immediately suspend further land acquisitions and investments in agrofuels. Instead, they want to see fundamental changes in consumption habits in developed countries – be it making more use of public transport or adopting different diets.
Chandrasekaran said: "Biofuels is just a small part of what is happening. What needs to change are consumption patterns in the west. That means [eating less] meat and dairy, given more than a third of the world's agricultural land goes to feeding meat and dairy production. It also means [reducing] consumption of fuel."
Geoffrey Styles has summarized well how our activities have upset the balance of the carbon cycle, “overloading it through the rapid release of vast quantities of stored carbon that had accumulated over geological time in fossil fuels.” If we accept the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, then the goal of climate policy is to cut that overloading by eliminating carbon-intensive energy sources, e.g. coal, and replacing them with much more efficiency and with lower-carbon energy.
“The coal industry destroy the land, pollute the air and water, impoverish communities, and sicken tens of thousands of people a year.”
“Yes, but it’s for the Greater Good.”
“What Greater Good?”
“Destruction of Life on the Planet as We know It.”
Some reject the idea of human-caused climate change out of principle; they have a God-given right to destroy life on the Planet as we know it. And, some reject the idea because of money; the idea threatens how and where their profits are made. (Or, it is profitable to support the denial.)
A tactic of those denying human-caused climate change is to use a basic understanding (which came about at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a United States of America, see The Invention of Air) that we need oxygen and plants need carbon dioxide. How plants make use of CO2 is part of the carbon cycle.
GP Wayne explains how this fact is used to deceive. Since it is recycled, a key part of the deception is that the CO2 will go away. The extra CO2 is cumulative because natural processes have not and increasingly cannot absorb all the extra CO2. Because the excess CO2 chiefly comes from burning fossil fuels, the level of atmospheric CO2 is building up, and that build up is accelerating. “Man-made CO2 has increased the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere by a third since the pre-industrial era”.
“Carbon is exchanged through natural processes among the land, ocean, atmosphere, and living things.” Our growing carbon footprint has upset the balance.
Consider what happens when more CO2 is released from outside of the natural carbon cycle – by burning fossil fuels. Although our output of 29 gigatons of CO2 is tiny compared to the 750 gigatons moving through the carbon cycle each year, it adds up because the land and ocean cannot absorb all of the extra CO2. About 40% of this additional CO2 is absorbed. The rest remains in the atmosphere, and as a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years (Tripati 2009).
Editor’s note: Tripati, et al suggest that a natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20,000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years and 2.3ppm between 2007 and 2008. This blog has suggested before such increases show non-linear threshold behavior.
P.S. The title comes from Don Blankenship calling Washington and state politicians caring about coal miner safety “as silly as Global Warming.”
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The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has a history of severely underreporting coal ash waste pollution and its threat to human and environmental health. This blog reported before that the EPA had begun a greater effort to regulate coal ash sites.
At the coal companies behest, coal state “representatives” quickly attacked. Such pandering incensed Grist’s David Roberts who sees the coal industry destroy the land, pollute the air and water, impoverish communities, and sicken tens of thousands of people a year. He sees the disregard for the safety of the people who dig the coal as another example of how coal kills and how our “elected” representatives continue to allow such malfeasance.
“You could not ask for a more craven illustration of the bankruptcy of national energy politics and the obeisance national legislators still must pay the coal industry, no matter what havoc it wreaks” than federal policy on coal waste sites.
Renee Schoof reports that “39 sites in 21 states where coal-fired power plants dump their coal ash are contaminating water with toxic metals such as arsenic and other pollutants, and that the problem is more extensive than previously estimated.”
The analysis of state pollution data by the Environmental Integrity Project, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to impose federally enforceable regulations for the first time. An alternative option would leave regulation of coal ash disposal up to the states, as it is now.
The EPA will hold the first of seven nationwide hearings about the proposed regulation Monday in Arlington, Va. A public comment period ends Nov. 19.
The electric power industry is lobbying to keep regulation up to individual states. Environmental groups say the states have failed to protect the public and that the EPA should set a national standard and enforce it.
“This is a huge and very real public health issue for Americans,” said the director of the study, Jeff Stant of the Environmental Integrity Project. “Coal ash is putting drinking water around these sites at risk.”
EIP is a nonpartisan organization that advocates for enforcement of environmental laws. They have focused upon coal ash sites, like the impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Power Plant from which 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash laden with arsenic, lead and radioactive elements spilled in December 2009. The cleanup nightmare continues. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that the TVA is shipping some of the coal ash to two landfills, one in Taylor County near Mauk, Georgia, and the other in Perry County in Alabama, as part of a two-week “disposal test.”
Similar Posts:“If people ask, is there a problem EPA should address, this report answers, ‘Yes’ with an exclamation mark,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice.
Evans said that the state regulation hasn’t protected people living near the waste sites from health problems. Many states have allowed the dumps to be built without adequate liners or monitoring and have done little when contamination was discovered, she said.
Of the 39 sites analyzed, 35 had groundwater monitoring wells on the grounds of the waste disposal area. All of them showed concentration of heavy metals such as arsenic and lead that exceeded federal health standards.
The other four had only water monitoring data from rivers or lakes where the waste sites discharged water. Scientists found contamination that damaged aquatic life.
The new report, following a previous study by the environmental groups and EPA’s own tally, brings the number of contaminated coal waste sites to 137 in 34 states.
Thursday’s report specified the amount of arsenic, cadmium, lead, selenium and other pollutants found at each site. The pollutants are linked to cancer, respiratory diseases and other health and developmental problems.
Most states don’t require monitoring of drinking water near the waste sites. The study found five sites where monitoring figures were available, and all of them had some contamination. In four, tests showed problems at one or more drinking-water wells. In Joliet, Ill., where the information was too limited for analysis, at least 18 nearby wells were closed because of boron contamination, the report said.
The U.S. burns more than 1 billion tons of coal a year to generate about half of the nation’s electricity. It ends up with at least 125 million tons of coal waste, including ash and the sludge left from scrubbers that remove air pollutants.
Federal enforcement of coal-ash disposal rules would mean classifying the waste as hazardous. Opponents have argued that this would add costs and make it harder to recycle some of the waste to help hold down disposal costs.
The report from the environmental groups said that more than a third of the reused coal ash is for structural fill or to fill up empty mines. The report said those uses could result in water contamination.
Concerted action to tackle climate change will happen only if the public demands it for the sake of future generations
"How did you become an activist?" I was surprised by the question. I never considered myself an activist. I am a slow-paced taciturn scientist from the Midwest US. Most of my relatives are pretty conservative. I can imagine attitudes at home toward "activists".
I was about to protest the characterisation – but I had been arrested, more than once. And I had testified in defence of others who had broken the law. Sure, we only meant to draw attention to problems of continued fossil fuel addiction. But weren't there other ways to do that in a democracy? How had I been sucked into being an "activist?"
My grandchildren had a lot to do with it. It happened step by step. First, in 2004, I broke a 15-year self-imposed effort to stay out of the media. I gave a public lecture, backed by scientific papers, showing the need to slow greenhouse gas emissions – and I criticised the Bush administration for its lack of appropriate policies. My grandchildren came into the talk only as props – holding 1-watt Christmas tree bulbs to help explain climate forcings.
Fourteen months later I gave another public talk – connecting the dots from global warming to policy implications to criticisms of the fossil fuel industry for promoting misinformation. This time my grandchildren provided rationalisation for a talk likely to draw ire from the administration. I explained that I did not want my children to look back and say: "Opa understood what was happening, but he never made it clear."
What had become clear was that our planet is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea levels to rise and species to become extinct beyond our control. Increasing atmospheric water vapour is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.
Stabilising climate requires restoring our planet's energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth's energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.
Actions needed for the world to move on to clean energies of the future are feasible. The actions could restore clean air and water globally. But the actions are not happening.
At first I thought it was poor communication. Scientists must not have made the story clear enough to world leaders.
So I wrote letters to national leaders and visited more than half a dozen nations, as described in my book, Storms of My Grandchildren. What I found in each case was greenwash – a pretence of concern about climate but policies dictated by fossil fuel special interests.
The situation is epitomised by my recent trip to Norway. I hoped that Norway, because of its history of environmentalism, might be able to take real action to address climate change, drawing attention to the hypocrisy in the words and pseudo-actions of other nations.
So I wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting that Norway, as majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in its plans to develop the tar sands of Canada. I received a polite response, by letter, from the deputy minister of petroleum and energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is "a commercial decision", that the government should not interfere, and that a "vast majority in the Norwegian parliament" agree that this constitutes "good corporate governance". The deputy minister concluded his letter: "I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad."
A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the deputy minister's letter, quoted Saint Augustine: "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue."
The Norwegian position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts.
It becomes clear that concerted action will happen only if the public, somehow, becomes forcefully involved. One way citizens can help is by blocking coal plants, tar sands, and the mining of the last drops of fossil fuels.
However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognise an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used. Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.
A carbon fee is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.
Governments today, instead, talk of "cap-and-trade with offsets", a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.
Because the executive and legislative branches of our governments turn a deaf ear to the science, the judicial branch may provide the best opportunity to redress the situation. Our governments have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations.
I look forward to standing with young people and their supporters, helping them develop their case, as they demand their proper due and fight for nature and their future. I guess that makes me an activist.
• The full version of this essay, entitled "Activist", will appear in the book The Day After Tomorrow; Images of Our Earth in Crisis by J Henry Fair, to be published in November by PowerHouse Books. Dr James Hansen's latest book is called Storms of my Grandchildren.
Todd Woody reports on licensing of the nation’s first large-scale solar thermal power plant in two decades. Licensing of the 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project comes after a two-and-a-half-year environmental review. The author is now hopeful that several other big solar farms will receive approval from the California Energy Commission in the next month.
The Beacon solar thermal electric power plant will use long rows of mirrored parabolic troughs, which focus sunlight on liquid-filled tubes to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. While using water may have been a business decision for NextEra developers, there certainly are other options, e.g., indirect dry cooling (Heller system) or using a molten salt loop to collect heat from the sun.
“I hope this is the first of many more large-scale solar projects we will permit,” said Jeffrey D. Byron, a member of the California Energy Commission, at a hearing in Sacramento on Wednesday. “This is exactly the type of project we want to see.”
Developers and regulators have been racing to license solar power plants and begin construction before the end of the year, when federal incentives for such renewable energy projects expire. California’s three investor-owned utilities also face a deadline to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by the end of 2010.
Still, it has been long slog as solar power plants planned for the Mojave Desert have become bogged down in disputes over their impact on protected wildlife and scarce water supplies.
The 50 MW La Florida solar farm uses parabolic trough technology and a molten salt system for thermal storage. The new, Archimede solar thermal electric power plant in Italy does not use molten salt just for thermal storage. It uses a molten salt loop to collect heat from the sun.
Similar Posts:In March 2008, NextEra Energy Resources filed an application to build the Beacon project on 2,012 acres of former farmland in California’s Kern County… Some rural residents immediately objected to the 521 million gallons of groundwater the project would consume annually in an arid region on the western edge of the Mojave Desert. After contentious negotiations with regulators, NextEra agreed to use recycled water that will be piped in from a neighboring community.
“It’s been a lengthy process, an almost embarrassingly long lengthy process,” said Scott Busa, NextEra’s Beacon project manager, at Wednesday’s hearing. “Hopefully, we’re going from a lengthy process to a timely process.”
However, an attorney for a union group that has been critical of Beacon told commissioners that obstacles still stand in the way of the power plant.
“Despite all the hard work that has been done, this project won’t get built anytime soon,” said Tanya Gulesserian, representing California Unions for Reliable Energy. She cited the absence of a deal to sell electricity from the Beacon power plant to a utility.
Mr. Busa responded that NextEra is in the final stages of negotiating a power purchase agreement.
Photographer Toby Smith talks about his pictures documenting hydroelectric generation in Scotland, where man-made dams and turbine halls are absorbed into stunning natural landscapes
“That sounds ominous”
What?
“The title of your post, especially since I have trouble with pronunciation of the name of the place.”
There exists an underlying conflict between “a cultural growth / debt imperative” and a planet with finite sources and sinks.
It probably would come tripping off your lips if you were native Hawaiian. Waimanalo Gulch is adjacent to “the largest concentration of Native Hawaiians on Oahu” and that’s where the bales probably will end up.
“The bales?”
They are nicely plastic-wrapped and Mike Chutz, president of Hawaiian Waste Systems, says they contain nothing ecologically dangerous.
“Nicely plastic-wrapped bales of what?”
Honolulu garbage. HuffPoz Herbert Sample tells us that Honolulu has a problem: What to do with its garbage?
Honolulu makes up 80 percent of Hawaii’s population and generates nearly 1.6 million tons of garbage a year. More than a third of the trash is incinerated to generate electricity. The remaining garbage is sent to the 21-year-old Waimanalo Gulch landfill on the island of Oahu’s southwestern coast.
City officials signed a contract for burning 40 million pounds at an existing waste-to-power plant over the next six months.
“That’s quite a bit…”
Well, they were motivated. The gigantic piles of odious shrink-wrapped rubbish have been moldering in the heat of a Hawaii industrial park for more than five months. So, we’ve come around again to that question, is it better to bury it or burn it?
Or, hey, I know, let’s make it a problem for somebody else. Hawaiian Waste Systems is Seattle-based firm, and Honolulu officials had counted on “a plan to ship at least 100,000 tons of blue, plastic-wrapped garbage bales each year to a landfill near an Indian reservation in Washington state… But” (can you imagine) “the tribe vehemently objected and won a court ruling last week that put the plan on hold indefinitely.”
The city hopes to start operating a third trash furnace at its electricity-generating plant in Kapolei, allowing the burning of about 902,000 tons a year.
Still, that leaves this island with a lot of garbage generated from some 907,000 residents, 51,000 military service members and families, and an average of 80,000 tourists a day. They produced almost 1.6 million tons in the fiscal year that ended June 30, a drop from the 1.8 million tons the previous year that is largely due to the recession and a decline in tourism.
Hey, wait a sec, wasn’t Bobby Jindal wanting to build some artificial barriers? By gosh, we could help the Louisiana Governor out faster than you can say “Piyush Amrit”. Let’s get those spin doctors working on it.
“Which ones?”
They got all those movie stars before…
“Oh, do you mean Sweet Sustainability?”
Yeah, remember, in the lounge, when she said she was working for the “They Made Me Wet My Pants” Foundation (chuckle).
“So… Do you want me to take Tyler off the theme park concept?
No, no, let’s keep our options open.
Other AG posts on the topic of burning municipal solid waste
Similar Posts:Cairn Energy's oil and gas find sparks hopes that Greenland can ditch its reliance on fishing and tourism
The rain was tipping down today on the cluster of multicoloured buildings in the heart of the capital of Greenland but there was no dampening the spirits of Nuuk's residents following news that hydrocarbons had been found.
"We have always believed there was oil and gas off this island. We been waiting for something like this to happen for decades," said Kenni Rende, a 44-year-old shop assistant at the town's only electronics shop. "I hope it will provide income for Greenland so that we can finance our way to becoming a more independent nation," he added.
The mood of elation was shared at the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, one block away, where Henrik Stendal was preparing for a presentation in a small room packed with maps and rocks.
"It is exciting. This amounts to an appetiser for all oil companies to come here and do more exploration, seismic and data," said Stendal, who is the head of the bureau's geology department.
Greenland's government had been hopeful that Cairn Energy had found signs of hydrocarbons but the ultra-secretive nature of the business – and its extraordinary importance – meant the British oil company had told no one in advance.
Bill Gammell, Cairn's chief executive, said there were signs of oil and gas bearing sands, but the hole still needed to be drilled to its target depth. Stendal said it was highly encouraging given the six wells drilled over the last 40 years had been completely "dry". A one-in-seven hit rate would mark this area out as exceptional; the North Sea equivalent is around one in 30.
It reinforces the views of the US Geological Survey which said last year that it believed there could be 90bn barrels of oil and 50tn cubic metres of gas in the wider Arctic region.
Enormously positive then for a Greenland desperate to move away from dependence on fishing, tourism and handouts from the Danish state which has sovereignty over the world's largest island. But nervous moments for Greenpeace and other environmentalists keen to keep one of the Earth's last wilderness areas away from the oil industry.
Whatever the eco-warriors want, Big Oil is coming and the Cairn discovery could not be better timed.
In around two weeks time the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum will announce the winners of a new licensing round.
Stendal would not say who they were but he admitted that most of the leading lights – that means the likes of ExxonMobil and Shell – are queuing up to drill in Baffin Bay off the west of Greenland.
And the find will heat up interest in two new licensing rounds in other parts of the country that are already being lined up to take place in 2011 and 2012.
It is not just Greenland that it keen to explore in an Arctic region whose natural environment is already being eroded by global warming.
Iceland, Norway and Russia are also looking at handing out exploration rights, although BP's blowout in the Gulf of Mexico has sent a ripple of anxiety through the west's safety authorities.
Cairn and the Greenland authorities claim the water depths being drilled by the Stena Don and Stena Forth floating rig and drillship are less than one-third of the 1,500 metres of the Gulf.
They also point out that there are 16 vessels working on standby around the Cairn well, T8-1, and six of them are specifically given over to guiding icebergs out of the way.
Stendal says Greenland drilling regulations are tougher than those enforced in the North Sea, and far stricter than the lax rules of the Gulf.
He is confident that all is being done to ensure that there can be no recurrence of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in freezing waters where oil would break down much more slowly than in the warm currents off Louisiana.
But this will not reassure Greenpeace, which has taken its ship Esperanza into the region to highlight its concerns.
The environmental group said the move was wrong, not least because Cairn was a relatively small company with no experience of drilling in harsh conditions and had made its name discovering onshore oil in India.
"We think it is completely irresponsible for Cairn to proceed with these operations when the US, Canada and Norway have imposed tough new restrictions on deepwater drilling until lessons can be learned about what exactly went wrong in the Gulf," said Mads Flarup Christensen, secretary general of Greenpeace Nordic. "Drilling in these kinds of waters is very sad. It shows the way the oil industry is being forced into the last frontiers by trying to exploit tar sands and deep water."
Cairn management recently visited the Greenland capital to reassure the public that it would stick to the highest possible safety standards in line with an agreement signed with the government. "Security has always been the most important in everything we do and so we want it to continue," commercial director Simon Thomson said.
He does not need to convince Stendal who says that Greenpeace is "not welcome" by the people of Greenland, who see the organisation as a threat to their future economic wellbeing. "You cant live on fish alone," he says drily.
But at the Nota Bene electronics shop, Rende is not quite so equivocal: "We had heard of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico but I hope the [Cairn] security makes us safe."
This blog just had mentioned that developers generally will choose silicon when they choose photo voltaic for utility-scale solar electric power plant, and the Big Gav gives us a Pacific* example.
* Editor’s note: Australia runs with the APEC (Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate) “pack of polluters”. Germany leads in PV production and as this blog has noted before, the Dragon has its eye on this pie.
From the Climate Spectator, we learn that Australian renewable energy company CBD Energy has secured a $300 million project to build a 99MW solar photovoltaic power plant in Thailand.
While this represents the largest ever renewable energy contract for CBD Energy, it simply is another example of why Germany is the leader in the global Photo Voltaic market. CBD Energy is in business with the German solar company SOLON SE.
“As the photovoltaic market continues to grow on a global scale, SOLON has expanded its international operations. In the first few years of its history, SOLON was active almost completely in Germany. By 2007, the company achieved 70 % of their group sales abroad.”
SOLON, founded in 1997, is one of the leading producers of photovoltaic modules in Germany and a specialist for the integration of photovoltaic technologies into buildings. About 70% of the photovoltaic plants on the buildings at the German Federal Government come from SOLON. The SOLON Mover is the largest industrially manufactured turnkey solar tracking system in the world. This system enables entire towns to be supplied with solar energy.
The contact to build a utility-scale photo voltaic power plant in Thailand “includes a power purchase agreement with Thailand’s electricity authority, Provincial Electricity Authority of Thailand.”
Similar Posts:The Thai government announced its intention to source 20 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, a similar target to Australia’s, and has a range of tax and investment incentives to attract investment in its renewable energy sector.
Energy efficiency scheme funded by energy company Calor identifies Berwick-upon-Tweed among most fuel-poor rural areas
Suffolk, Northumberland and Nottinghamshire contain the most areas of fuel poverty in rural England, according to a new initiative to tackle the problem.
The Future of Rural Energy England (FREE) – a new energy efficiency scheme funded by energy company Calor – has matched fuel poverty data with areas of England that are off mains gas, showing Forest Heath in Suffolk, Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland, and Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire contain the highest proportion of fuel-poor households in off-mains gas England.
Fuel poverty in the UK is defined as when a household spends more than 10% of its income of total fuel use.
FREE says the results show that rural fuel poverty is often very different from urban fuel poverty. Stephen Rennie, managing director of Calor said: "Rural fuel poverty does not always neatly align with social poverty but is more closely associated with the quality of housing stock in the area or by single or elderly households living in larger, hard-to-heat homes. In a climate of rising household bills and economic uncertainty, many people are worried about the cost of energy as well as the environmental impact of their energy use."
The initiative aims to work at a local level in communities to provide tailored advice to those paying out the biggest percentage of their household incomes on fuel, generating a better understanding of the energy options open to them. Calor will be working with fuel poverty charity National Energy Action (NEA) and the Rural Community Action Network across England (ACRE) to fund regional energy officers, who will offer independent advice to off-gas grid households and communities to help improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.
The officers will also be able to advise on the various grants available to improve insulation and heating systems, including the eligibility criteria for applications. Similar initiatives will run in Scotland and Wales with NEA sister agencies Energy Action Scotland and National Energy Action Cymru.
Wind farm developers reject allegations their vessels caused seal mutilations. From BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Network
Offshore wind farm developers implicated in a mysterious spate of seal deaths have vigorously denied allegations their construction vessels could be to blame.
Scientists investigating the killings believe the deaths were caused by a vessel with a ducted propeller that has caused "corkscrew-style" mutilations on the seals' bodies.
Callan Duck, a senior research scientist at St Andrews University Seal Mammal Research Unit, told BusinessGreen.com that vessels operating between Statoil's Sheringham Shoal wind farm and Wells Harbour in North Norfolk might be the cause.
"Wind farms per se are not to blame," he said. "It's possible that some of the vessels involved in wind farm construction might be responsible, but we do not know that for sure."
At least 33 mutilated seals have been found washed ashore recently in Norfolk, St Andrews Bay and the Firth of Forth in Scotland. Similar unsolved seal deaths have also been reported off the Atlantic coast of Canada in the past decade.
However, engineering firm Scira, Sheringham Shoal's main contractor, denied the allegations.
"Both Scira and the police have checked all equipment on vessels operating at the site and found no connection," said Scira in a statement yesterday.
Meanwhile, harbour operator Wells Harbour Commissioners (WHC) issued a statement arguing that the boats accused of causing the injuries could not have been responsible.
"These seals began to be found in December 2009 but the fast supply boats using Wells to service the wind farm did not start operating from Wells until April 2010," the company said. "It is therefore entirely wrong to assume that the works to create the new Outer Harbour in Wells are coincident with these seal deaths."
WHC went on to explain that the vessel carrying out dredging work for the wind farm is operating seven miles away from the seal colony at Blakeney where the animals seem to have been killed.
Finally, the harbour said it had been operating boats with ducted propellers "for many years with no such problems reported".
A spokesman for Scottish Environment secretary Richard Lochhead, who commissioned the investigation into the seal deaths, refused to comment on specific theories of death until the studies are concluded.
"I'm hopeful the team at St Andrews can get to the root cause of these disturbing seal mortalities," said Lochhead in a statement. "A number of possible explanations are being considered and I look forward to the investigation being successfully concluded."
Wind farm operators are increasingly frustrated that the industry has been repeatedly linked to incidents of widllife mortalities with turbines having been accused of killing birds and bats as well as seals.
Advocates of the industry maintain there is little eveidence to suggest wind farms are responsible for high wildlife death rates, while insiders are also quick to point out that traffic and household pets pose a far greater threat to British wildlife.
Environmental campaigners fear that drilling in the previously untouched Arctic area raises the risk of an environmental disaster on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon spill
Offshore wind power is a sustainable source of energy. Friends and foes alike recognize that the relatively short time from blueprint to operation makes wind energy the next best hope for reducing carbon emissions in the near term. (Banana farmers know that negawatts are least cost, most sustainable.)
Still this blog has despaired that the state of New York, despite being the headquarters for GE Energy, which wants a greater share of the off-shore wind market, would continue to fail. Despite having areas with excellent 7 to 9 wind quality close to major transmission lines, New York would not be one of those state where wind power development is most needed.
This blog despaired that developers of New York offshore wind development would continue to meet too great an opposition. Yet there is a glimmer of hope. Could the hundreds of large turbines that New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg envisioned off the Long Island Shore actually materialize off the New Jersey Shore? And, then, would not the opposition in New York look rather foolish?
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Located 30 kilometers off the west coast of Jutland in the North Sea, the 209 megawatt Horns Rev 2 now is the largest off-shore wind farm and inspiration for Mayor Bloomberg.
Timothy B. Hurst reports that New Jersey legislature has passed the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act.
The Offshore Wind Economic Development Act (pdf) directs the state’s Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to establish an offshore renewable energy certificate program that calls for a percentage of electricity sold in the state to be from offshore wind energy. The act would support the development of at least 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity.
The bill was signed into law yesterday by Gov. Chris Christie yesterday at a former BP port facility that will be transformed into a regional hub for the offshore wind industry.
“Developing New Jersey’s renewable energy resources and industry is critical to our state’s manufacturing and technology future,” Christie said.
The package will offer incentives including financial aid and tax credits to attract wind energy developers to the state’s waters.
Two offshore wind development companies, Fishermen’s Energy and Deepwater Wind, already have plans to develop offshore wind energy off the coast of New Jersey.
A report released last year by the Interior Department said shallow-water offshore wind farms could supply as much as 20% of the electricity in most coastal states. Researchers at the University of Delaware project that an average of 33 percent (and at most 47 percent) of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms could serve as reliable base load electric power. And, along the Atlantic Coast, much of that potential is in the form of off-shore wind energy. In the above map, the purple, red and dark blue areas are winds over 7.5 meters/sec (16.6 mph), more profitable and thus potentially good candidates for early development of wind turbines.
As this blog has noted before, wind power for the Eastern Interconnection — a service area in which more than 70 percent of the U.S. population lives — is a core climate solution. If utilities take responsibility for their impact upon the climate, then they would more likely choose wind as base load. Such a system requires sufficient geographic diversity of turbines and an effective distribution system.
In the US East Coast, as in much of the coastal areas of the world, the large wind power resource is over ocean and not over land. As offshore wind development moves forward in New Jersey, industry advocates are hopeful that the first Atlantic Coast wind farm will become a reality. The proposed Cape Wind offshore wind farm in Massachusetts is still fending off some last-ditch legal challenges. In neighboring Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri is hopeful for off-shore wind development. He notes that states are leading the way in off-shore wind development because it spurs economic development, helps to stabilize energy costs, and moves our country towards energy independence in a sustainable fashion.
Similar Posts:As this blog has noted before Amory Lovins and others believe in advanced thermoplastic composite structures because they combine light weight with strength. Thermoplastic components — reinforced with textile structures — perform much better in crash tests; they “absorb the forces generated in a collision through viscoelastic deformation of the matrix material without splintering.
Green Car Congress relays some important news from the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) in Pfinztal (Germany). Researchers “have developed a new way to make thermoplastic fiber composite materials. The materials engineers have designed the manufacturing process for large-scale use in vehicle construction.
Thermoplastics are incredibly tough. They can absorb 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. The concept car from Hypercar, Inc. shown above includes lightweight, crushable, plastic cones within the panels.
Modern cars are now built from a mixture of steels, aluminum and fiber-reinforced plastics. Highly stressed load-bearing structures and crash components that are designed to buckle on impact help to reinforce the body in order to protect the vehicle’s occupants in the event of a collision. Automakers have previously constructed these parts from composites using a thermoset (i.e. infusible) matrix. However, notes Fraunhofer, this approach has a number of disadvantages: as well as being difficult to implement efficiently in a mass production environment, it can also be potentially hazardous since this material tends to delaminate into sharp-edged splinters in a collision. A further problem is the fact that thermosets cannot be recycled.
Researchers had previously failed to come up with a suitable manufacturing technique for thermoplastic composite structures made from high-performance fibers. The ICT engineers have now developed a process suitable for mass production which makes it possible to manufacture up to 100,000 parts a year.
Our method offers comparatively short production times. The cycle time to produce thermoplastic components is only around five minutes. Comparable thermoset components frequently require more than 20 minutes.
—Dieter Gittel, a project manager at ICT
The Fraunhofer researchers have named their technique thermoplastic RTM (T-RTM). It is derived from the conventional RTM (Resin Transfer Molding) technique for thermoset fiber composites. The composite is formed in a single step.
We insert the pre-heated textile structure into a temperature-controlled molding tool so that the fiber structures are placed in alignment with the anticipated stress. That enables us to produce very lightweight components.
—Dieter Gittel
A cloth of woven carbon fiber filaments, a common element in composite materials.
The preferred types of reinforcement are carbon or glass fibers, and the researchers have also developed highly specialized structures. The next step involves injecting the activated monomer melt into the molding chamber. This contains a catalyst and activator system required for polymerization. The researchers can select the system and the processing temperature in a way that enables them to set the minimum required processing time.
As a demonstration, ICT engineers crafted a trunk liner for the Porsche Carrera 4 that weighs up to 50% less than the original aluminum part. To improve the crash behavior of the vehicle’s overall structure, the ICT engineers also calculated the optimum fiber placement.
The cost of the thermoplastic matrix material and the cost of its processing in T-RTM are up to 50% lower than the equivalent costs for thermoset structures.
There also is a renewed focus upon the life cycle of plastics, from the raw material used in manufacturer to how well these materials recycle. The GCC article notes that when thermoplastic products have reached end of life, “they can be shredded, melted down and reused to produce high-quality parts.”
A 2004 article supports this claim; thermoplastic resins, e.g., Cyclics Corporation CBT(R) resin, enable thermoforming and recycling. “Capitalizing on the water-like processing viscosity of CBT resin,” Radius Engineering Inc., a global leader in RTM injection systems developed a way to make low pressure cast parts and high fiber content thermoplastic composites. The parts “are lightweight, have improved damage tolerance, high stiffness, and high mechanical strength.”
Radius chemical engineers combined CBT resin and a catalyst in a “one-part system,” eliminating the need for meter mixing equipment and allowing their use of pressure and flow control injectors. Because of CBT resin’s extremely low viscosity, we believe that even larger, more complex parts can be injected in 60-120 seconds, with very high quality”, said Dimitrije Milovich, President of Radius Engineering, The 2004 article noted that this thermoplastic resin development also suggested the possibility of low pressure molding of traditionally injection molded thermoplastic parts.
Similar Posts:Many Americans think small behavioural changes such as switching off lights save more energy than they really do, says a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Breaking: Americans don't know squat about how to save energy. A new survey quizzed people on what steps make the biggest difference in cutting energy use and found loads of confusion.
Participants greatly overrated low-impact moves like flipping off light switches and unplugging phone chargers. They underrated potential high-impact changes like weatherizing homes, buying high-performing appliances, driving higher-mileage vehicles, and switching from centralized A/C to room air conditioners.
Twelve percent hurt themselves by trying to disconnect their light switches when not in use. OK, not really, but the actual results were nearly as crazy. About 2.8 percent of those responding said they could save energy by sleeping or relaxing more, as Felicity Barringer notes. That compares with 2.1 percent who said they could do so by insulating their homes (which is waaaay more effective).
"Participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true) and estimated that a central air-conditioner uses only 1.3 times the energy of a room air-conditioner (in fact, it uses 3.5 times as much)," wrote the researchers from Columbia University's Earth Institute.
As David Roberts is fond of noting, behavioral changes wield great potential for cutting energy use. But that would require people to have a basic level of energy literacy -- and the new survey suggests that Americans don't.
The theme of the confusion was that participants tended to name steps that involved doing less or using less of things -- turning off lights, turning down thermostats -- rather than solutions that allow them to get the same amount of light and heat through less energy (via insulation and LED bulbs). That gets at a key difference between conservation and efficiency. The first means using less; the second means getting the same results through more intelligent use of
resources. Both have a place, but it's a problem if people understand all of
efficiency as "sacrifice." A home retrofit that cuts $500 off your heating bills for the year isn't a sacrifice -- it's a financial and environmental win.
See, this is the sexiest topic in the world! I don't understand why more people don't spend their free time reading briefs from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
Rockhopper Exploration's latest well comes up dry, giving Falklands oil hopes another setback
Excitement about the potential of oil prospects off the Falklands was further punctured today when Rockhopper Exploration revealed it had failed to find crude with its latest exploration well.
Shares in the company fell 11% in early trading and led to sell-offs at other operators in waters that are still a matter of dispute between Britain and Argentina.
Rockhopper had rekindled enthusiasm about the Falklands as a new oil province with its Sea Lion discovery in May and was hoping to build on this with a further find with its Ernest well 75 miles away.
"The result of Ernest is disappointing, but the well was always designed to investigate an entirely different geological play type from Sea Lion," said Sam Moody, Rockhopper's managing director.
The latest failure follows setbacks for rivals Falkland Oil & Gas and Desire Petroleum whose shares were down 6% and 7% respectively on the Rockhopper result. Falkland last month abandoned its Toroa well, while Desire said earlier this year that it had found "poor" reservoir quality at its Liz prospect, the first exploration well off the islands since 1998, when companies including Royal Dutch Shell abandoned the area.
Falkland said it would resume drilling in the deepwater areas of its licence but was having trouble finding a suitable rig while oil analysts shrugged off the latest setback.
"Ernest was always seen as high risk and the investment case in Rockhopper remains focused on Sea Lion and the prospectivity elsewhere on the eastern margin of the basin," says Oriel Securities analyst Richard Rose.
Texas has taken the lead in wind power with more wind generation capacity than any other state, about 9,700 megawatts. (That’s nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.)
On Aug. 4, at about 5 p.m., electricity demand in Texas hit a record: 63,594 megawatts. Slate e-zine wants you to know this is bad news.
Orwellian? So last millennium.
Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is another industry observer that evokes this blog’s skepticism. In a Slate article, he takes a valid criticism and biases it to the best of his Chernobyl Zombie ability.
When it gets hot in Texas—and it’s darn hot in the Lone Star State in the summer—the state’s ratepayers can’t count on that wind energy …according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s wind turbines provided only about 500 megawatts of power when demand was peaking and the value of electricity was at its highest.
Put another way, only about 5 percent of the state’s installed wind capacity was available when Texans needed it most. Texans may brag about the size of their wind sector, but for all of that hot air, the wind business could only provide about 0.8 percent of the state’s electricity needs when demand was peaking.
Why does Texas get so little juice from the wind when it really needs it? Well, one of the reasons Texas gets so hot in the summer is that the wind isn’t blowing. Pressure gradients—differences in air pressure between two locations in the atmosphere—are largely responsible for the speed of the wind near the Earth’s surface. The greater the differences in pressure, the harder the wind blows. During times of extreme heat these pressure gradients often are minimal. The result: wind turbines that don’t turn.
Lest you think the generation numbers from Aug. 4 are an aberration, ERCOT has long discounted wind energy’s capabilities. In 2007, ERCOT determined that just “8.7 percent of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period for the next year.” And in 2009, the grid operator reiterated that it could depend on only 8.7 percent of Texas’ wind capacity.
We could argue how the antagonist defines dependable capacity. Instead, let’s accept the intermittent nature of wind in Texas and elsewhere and note what Bryce bludgeons with this fact. The attack is upon a surcharge that Texas residential ratepayers are now paying “…about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state’s urban centers.”
Image credit: Good
“A tyranny of policies that protect competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs” constrains the development of solar power. When it is hot, electricity from solar makes sense.
Other than a stipend and book sales what is the reason for this attack?
“remssssssss”
Well, yes, in the article Bryce is honest about his allegiance: “They [wind turbines in Texas] do not, cannot, replace coal-fired, gas-fired, or (my personal favorite) nuclear power plants.”
And, as this blog has noted before, better transmission makes renewable energy more available. We need more renewable energy sources, e.g., wind, solar thermal, etc.
Why? Well, in his attack, Bryce led with the chin. “It gets hot in Texas,” he tells us. And, it’s going to get hotter. A principle reason is human-caused, global heating. As Professor Joe tells us, you can’t go talking pressure gradients and advances in nuclear power, then turn around and deny climate change science.
In a sense that is what Bryce does when he presses the attack, arguing that monies going for better transmission are better invested in other, “more deserving and far more important to the general public” infrastructure, low-carbon items* like roads and pipelines.
” Editor’s note: Yes, the author was being facetious. Yes, he had to bite his tongue when he read the phrase, “politicians’ infatuation with wind energy.”
“At a time when America’s basic infrastructure is crumbling and in desperate need of new investment,” AG readers need no introduction to the basis for such Bryce’s fallacious objection to renewable energy sources. Instead, this blog wants to review an intriguing bit of information in Bryce’s Slate-published diatribe.
In June, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that said that “communities will need hundreds of billions of dollars in coming years to construct and upgrade wastewater infrastructure.”
A topic for this blog (read hand-waving) is waste streams as feedstock, specifically anaerobic digestion to produce methane and then application of this methane source to meet power demands. The infrastructure for co-digestion is substantial; and, if there is support for constructing and upgrading wastewater plants, then there is the possibility of including waste-to-energy equipment.
Other AG posts on the bias for nuclear power over renewable energy sources:
Similar Posts:• Controversial investor uses 27% stake to defy board
• Brian Myerson previously lobbied to sell off biofuels firm
The froideur between Brian Myerson, the controversial financier, and the board of D1 Oils dropped another few degrees today after he blocked a potential takeover of the ailing business by rival Mission NewEnergy.
In a statement, Mission said the deal between the two biofuel companies had the support of at least 41% of D1's shareholders as well as the backing of the D1 board. But it said the takeover would not go ahead because they had failed to secure the support of Principle Capital, where Myerson is chairman and which holds a 27% stake. A Principle spokesman said: "Based on the value of Mission's bid and its business plan, we are not interested in accepting their offer."
But one observer who had backed the bid said he failed to understand Myerson's motivation – he had previously been pressing the D1 board to either sell the company or break it up. "Maybe he thought a better alternative was simply winding the company up and getting some cash back," he said. "But I don't really understand. Sometimes these things can be emotive."
Shares in D1 fell 12% to 4.68p after the announcement.
Myerson was voted off as chairman of D1 in March after failing to persuade the business to merge with Principle Energy, an African sugar cane ethanol firm controlled by Principle. The activist investor then called an emergency shareholder meeting last month in a failed attempt to oust the board.
D1 is an alternative energy crop company focused on India. It is developing jatropha, a tropical oilseed-bearing plant, into a sustainable energy crop for use on marginal land not suitable for food. But the company has scaled back its ambitions over the past two years and is no longer refining, focusing instead on research and development, and jatropha plantations. A period as a joint venture with BP ended last year as BP began to shed some of its alternative energy investments.
Australia-based Mission is one of the world's largest jatropha firms, with access to more than 100,000 acres of land planted with the oil crop.
Myerson was last month given a "cold shoulder" sanction by the Takeover Panel, banning bankers and other advisers from working with him in a takeover situation for three years. It is understood that D1 has taken legal advice to establish whether that cold shoulder has been breached, but concluded they had little recourse.
South African-born Myerson, 51, who has been involved in a string of corporate bust-ups, has threatened to take the Takeover Panel to the European courts over its ruling. Its action was over his alleged breach of the City code by acting in concert with another party while buying up shares in the firm PCIT. He called the ruling "wholly wrong and misguided".
His strategy over many years has been to target companies thought to be underperforming and then force change to get the share price up, putting him in conflict with firms including Aquascutum, Liberty, Scholl, Pilkington and Signet.
A spokesman for D1 said the company was still in discussions with other potential buyers.
As we look for alternatives to oil, our familiar pattern of meadows and pastures could become interspersed with biofuel plantations
Yesterday Dustin Benton of the Campaign to Protect Rural England criticised the vision for the countryside outlined in our Zero Carbon Britain report. He argues that our proposals would disrupt the familiar look of the countryside.
Our vision for the countryside is about creating energy security, rural jobs and tackling climate change. It also increases food security – we can produce all of our own essential food in the UK. The benefits include many things the CPRE values: rural jobs, biodiversity and locally produced food.
But it does result in a landscape that looks very different. That said, I think the changes we propose are not as drastic or unattractive as Dustin imagines. We can avoid the monoculture plantations he's worried about and the increased diversity of what we grow will lead to a mixed patchwork landscape.
But we still face a dilemma about UK-grown energy crops. I'm pleased that we've agreed on the need for a rapid decarbonisation and to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. However, without UK-grown energy crops we have a problem: where will we get the aviation fuel from?
We have several other options:
• We could carry on making it from oil. This commits to looking for oil in increasingly difficult and dangerous places such as offshore drilling and from tar sands. Both of which are destroying the "warp and weft" of someone else's "historic landscape".
• We could make aviation fuel from biofuels grown in another country. This would destroy the "familiar meadows and pastures" of someone else's countryside. Recent experience has shown us that growing biofuels has led to a variety of problems including food shortages and human rights abuses.
• We could cut aviation entirely. No aviation means no energy crops interfering with our "valued English landscapes". We thought a two-thirds reduction in aviation was radical – but maybe you think we can persuade the British public to ditch flying completely.
Unfortunately Dustin's suggestion of importing solar electricity from north Africa doesn't help here. It could help meet electricity demand but does not help with aviation fuel. And it's aviation fuel that is the main demand for energy crops in our scenario.
This touches the core of our dilemma. I can't see a way to maintain an idealised chocolate box landscape that also provides us with enough aviation fuel to maintain even a small amount of flying.
All human societies have faced challenges. The scale of those facing us today are perhaps greater than any in recorded history. A changing climate, diminishing fossil fuel reserves and rising energy demands are inter-connected problems that need a common solution.
Dustin is right to say the landscape will change. We need a landscape that creates low carbon jobs, food and energy – not one that struggles to deal with a changing climate and its disastrous consequences.
• Alex Randall is a spokesman for the Centre for Alternative Technology
The idea that we are "watering down" our commitment is simply incorrect (Dirtiest coal power plants win reprieve, 16 August): this government has committed to introducing an emissions performance standard. We are moving as quickly as possible and our consultation on a radical reform of the electricity market to deliver secure, affordable and low carbon energy will be out within six months of the election, while a white paper will be published within a year. The view that this might raise the possibility of new coal-fired power stations "slipping through the system" is ludicrous.
We consider planning applications thoroughly and will not allow any new coal power station to be built unless equipped with carbon capture and storage. While we will consult on the final details of an emissions performance standard, I am clear that without CCS it would be impossible to meet such a standard. However, an EPS on its own is not a magic bullet to decarbonise our economy. We have inherited an energy system that has suffered from a lack of clear direction and was not fit for purpose. That is why we will be implementing comprehensive electricity market reform to ensure that we can have a secure, low-carbon, affordable electricity mix for decades to come.
Secretary of state for energy and climate change
• Your article on Danish wind farms (10 August) ignores several key facts. There are more than 40 anti-wind turbine groups active in Denmark, because more people, in spite of the financial incentives for communities living within 5km to a windmill, are fed up with the noise and destruction of landscape and natural habitat. 20% of Denmark's electricity may be generated by wind, but less than 5% is used in Denmark. Due to intermittency and location, most is virtually donated to Denmark's northern neighbours, who store it as hydroelectric and sell it back to the Danes at peak periods for huge profits, ensuring that the Danes pay among the highest electricity tariffs in the EU. Denmark's CO2 emissions have substantially increased over the last five years, mainly due to increased coal-fired "back up" generators. The main reason the Danish government imposes more turbines in the face of opposition is that their manufacture is a major employer and export.
By directing subsidies away from unpredictable wind to tidal, methane, biomass, micro-hydrogeneration and conservation, the UK would have no need to import noisy expensive intermittent turbines and would produce tens of thousands of permanent jobs. The French, with more technically qualified people in government and the civil service than the UK, have ensured their recent Grenelle-2 energy policy will effectively halt wind-farm development.
J Jenkins
Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan
Project could power Rwanda for decades, while reducing risk of disaster for two million people living alongside 'exploding lake'
It's dusk on Lake Kivu and the fishermen sing while paddling out in their catamarans, three canoes secured together with long wooden poles. As the twin volcanoes on the far shore disappear into the darkness the men spark kerosene lamps to attract the sambaza sardines into their nets. Across the vast lake their lanterns offer the only tiny sequins of light.
At least that is how it used to be. Now, near the northern shore, the bright florescent bulbs illuminating a tall barge can be seen from miles away. It is the start of a project that could light up the whole of Rwanda for decades, while also reducing the risk of disaster for the two million people living alongside this rare "exploding lake".
In a world first, the barge is extracting gases that are trapped deep in Lake Kivu's waters like the fizz in a champagne bottle. Methane, the main constituent of natural gas used for household cooking and heating, is then separated out and piped back to the rugged shore where it fires three large generators.
The state-owned Kibuye Power plant is already producing 3.6MW of electricity, more than 4% of the country's entire supply. But the success of the pilot project, and the huge unmet demand for power in Rwanda — only one in 14 homes have access to electricity — has encouraged local and foreign investors to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to new methane plants along the lakeshore.
Within two years, the government hopes to be getting a third of its power from Lake Kivu, and eventually aims to produce so much energy from methane to be able to export it to neighbouring countries.
"Our grandfathers knew there was gas in this lake but now have we proved that it can be exploited," said Alexis Kabuto, the Rwandan engineer who runs the $20m Kibuye project. "It's a cheap, clean resource that could last us 100 years."
Historically, Lake Kivu's gas has been a killer. Deaths attributed to invisible pockets of carbon dioxide rising from vents along the shoreline, known as mazukus, or "evil winds", are frequently reported, especially on the Congo side. But it is the gas dissolved in the water that may present a far greater threat.
Some scientists say that the ever-expanding volumes of carbon dioxide and methane in Lake Kivu, coupled with the nearby volcanic activity, make a limnic eruption (also referred to as a lake overturn, in which CO2 suddenly erupts from the lake) highly likely at some stage in the future unless degassing occurs. This has now begun with the extraction of some of the 60bn cubic metres of methane in the water.
The world's only two other known "exploding lakes", Monoun and Nyos, both in Cameroon, overturned in the 1980s. The clouds of carbon dioxide that burst through from the deep water left about 1,800 people dead from asphyxiation. But Lake Kivu is nearly 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, and is in a far more densely populated area. Cindy Ebinger, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Rochester in the US, who co-authored a study earlier this year that described Kivu as possibly "one of the most dangerous lakes in the world", said: "You don't even want to think about the scale of the devastation that could occur."
The lake's potential to both enhance and destroy lives stems from its geography. Nestled on the border between Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, it sits at the highest point of the western arm of the Great Rift Valley. On the Congolese side, Mount Nyiragongo and Mount Nyamulagira have erupted in recent years, the former sending scalding tongues of lava into the lake in 2002. The seismic activity around the lake is responsible for the steady injection of volcanic gas into the water, where it settles in a dense saline layer more than 260 metres beneath the surface.
To harvest the methane, heavy water is sucked up through a pipe to the barge, where the liquid and gases are separated. The gas then enters a "scrubber" that separates the methane and carbon dioxide. Ebinger said reducing the overall concentration of gas in the water was a positive move, but warned that more studies were urgently needed to assess the potential environmental impact, especially relating to the unused water and carbon dioxide pumped back into Lake Kivu from the barges.
"With so many projects, if you don't understand everything, you can solve one problem and create three more," she said.
Regardless, Rwanda is proceeding at great speed. Kibuye Power aims to increase its output to 50MW within a few years. A private Rwandan firm is testing the technology on its own barge nearby and has a license to produce a similar amount. And a US company, Contour Global, last year signed a $325m deal with Rwanda to produce 100MW of power from methane.
Talks are also under way with Congo, which has rights to half the natural gas in the lake, about building a joint 200MW plant.
China's economy has been growing at almost 10% since it embraced economic reforms and free-market principles
China's rise to be crowned as the world's second-largest economy today is the latest milestone in a boom that has been running almost constantly since the country began the long process of embracing free-market principles more than 30 years ago.
The Chinese economy has been growing at an average of almost 10% – three times the global average – since Deng Xiaoping became leader and started to introduce economic reforms. In dollar terms, its GDP has jumped from $147.3bn in 1978 to $4.9tn in 2009. Even if Japan's own economy hadn't faltered in recent months, China was expected to expand by another 10% this year so it was always likely to overtake its eastern neighbour before 2011. Some analysts argue that China is underestimating its own growth, and may be powering ahead even quicker than thought.
China has recently claimed the top spot in a number of important economic league tables, as it drags the world economy out of the global downturn.
• The WTO has calculated that China became the world's biggest exporter in 2009, usurping Germany. This increased the pressure on China to revalue the yuan, a move it has proved reluctant to make.
• More cars are now made in China than any other country. In 2009, 13.79m vehicles were constructed in Chinese factories, comfortably exceeding Japan, with 7.93m, and the US, with 5.7m.
• China is also the biggest market for new cars. Sales of new passenger vehicles leapt by more than 50% last year, pushing up total sales to 13.64m units. This saw it overtake the US, where sales fell by around a fifth to 10.43m.
• Last month China became the world's largest energy user, after its appetite for power more than doubled in the last decade. Most of the demand comes from the nation's huge manufacturing operations, but its population are also using more energy as their standards of living improve, and more of them buy computers, cars and domestic appliances. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China consumed the equivalent of 2,252m tons of oil in 2009. China has refused to accept this, claiming the IEA's data is unreliable and stressing that it has made strides in energy efficiency.
• China's energy consumption means it has taken another unwelcome title: the world's biggest emitter of carbon. It appears that China overtook the US in 2007, according to information collected for the Copenhagen summit …
• … but it is also spending billions of dollars on renewable energy sources. Analysts believe it doubled its wind generation capacity from 12.1GW in 2008 to 25.1GW in 2009, making it the world's largest wind market.
The latest data shows that the Chinese economy grew by 9.1% in 2009, despite most of the developed world suffering a painful recession. Its GDP is still just a third the size of America's, but economists believe the two will converge within a decade. Earlier this year, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) said that a "seismic change" was underway in the world economy and that China would catch America by 2020, with India and Mexico leading the stampede of emerging economies.
Last year, the biggest economies were the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, in that order. By 2020, PWC believes the top six will read China, the US, India, Japan, Brazil, and Russia, with Germany in seventh place and the UK down in 10th.
John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PWC, also predicted that China would be "some way ahead of the US by 2030".
China relaxed its strict communist economic policies after the pain caused by the Great Leap Forward – Mao's attempt to modernise China, which resulted in millions of deaths and derailed its economy for many years. This prompted the first wave of foreign investment into the country, since when the Chinese authorities have repeatedly intervened to rein in growth and battle inflation.
There have been problems – China's stock market crashed in 2008 after a speculative boom turned sour. Some analysts now believe that the country is about to suffer a property crash that will hurt its banking sector. Hedge fund manager Jim Chanos warned in April that the Chinese real estate bubble might burst later this year or in 2011. Construction is a major part of China's economy, and a property slowdown – or worse could knock its economic growth.