Muscling The Waves  

Inside Greentech has a good article on developments in the wave power arena.

Bobbing in the waters off St. Petersburg, Florida as of today, a buoy with "artificial muscle" technology is waiting. What will it do with its newfound muscles? That's what high profile Palo Alto, California research organization SRI International aims to find out.

The wave-powered generator works off a novel electroactive polymer artificial muscle, or EPAM, originally developed at SRI. "It's a rubbery material. In this case we take a sheet of the rubbery material, and the way it stretches and contracts, that directly generates electricity," SRI senior research engineer Roy Kornbluh told Inside Greentech.

The artificial muscle-bound wave power generator is currently capable of generating 20 joules of energy per stroke, which SRI said corresponds to an average output power of more than 5 watts under typical ocean wave conditions. "If all goes according to plan, next year we should have an order of magnitude or more, maybe 100 watts," said Kornbluh, who said that it might be ready for market within 5 years.

The wave power test is part of a program sponsored by Tokyo's Hyper Drive, a two-year-old venture backed startup focused on the application of EPAM to wave power generation. "The advantage of the EPAM is that it directly converts motion into electricity," said Kornbluh. "We don't need pistons, or generators," he added, making the system more cost-efficient and reliable.

The technology at the heart of the new generator is from Artificial Muscle, which was spun-off from SRI in 2003. The company, which received $20 million in Series B round funding in June, designs and manufactures solid-state actuator components for use in speakers, generators, motors, pumps, valves and sensors. Of course, SRI and its offspring aren't the only ones looking to harness tidal power.

* The U.K.'s FreeFlow 69 recently announced successful tests on a vertical axis free flow device which it says could be used to create electricity offshore or in tidal rivers and inland waterways.
* Verdant Power has a trial underway in the East River off Manhattan (see Verdant deploys tidal power array in New York) and is eyeing other projects.
* Finavera Renewables (TSX Venture: FVR) started construction in June on the second generation of its AquaBuOY wave energy converter (see Latest Finavera family member: another buoy).
* Ocean Power Technologies has a PowerBuoy system, based on modular, ocean-going buoys (see OPT devices certified as compliant with grid). Other players in the field include Ocean Power Delivery and SyncWave (see New ocean power player SyncWave calls itself cheaper).

But SRI said its generator wouldn't need as many moving parts. "It would be more like an underwater flag, waving underwater, oscillating back and forth," said Kornbluh. "Instead of making one huge turbine, you could make many smaller things spread out over a very large area."

SRI is aiming for 25 watts of average output on the buoy, but future plans include a device capable of generating power in the kilowatts range for large-scale clean energy production.

The Guardian has an article on the Iraqi parliament sneaking off on their summer break without passing Bush's oil law - "Good news from Baghdad at last: the oil law has stalled".

The panic and distraction of the security crisis should not be used as cover for handing Iraq's wealth to foreigners .

Glad tidings from Baghdad at last. The Iraqi parliament has gone into summer recess without passing the oil law that Washington was pressing it to adopt. For the Bush administration this is irritating, since passage of the law was billed as a "benchmark" in its battle to get Congress not to set a timetable for US troop withdrawals. The political hoops through which the government of Nouri al-Maliki has been asked to jump were meant to be a companion piece to the US "surge". Just as General David Petraeus, the current US commander, is due to give his report on military progress next month, George Bush is supposed to tell Congress in mid-September how the Maliki government is moving forward on reform.

The signs are that, on both fronts, the administration will carry on playing for time. Bush and his officials are already suggesting they will maintain the surge for another year, and that Petraeus's report will merely be an interim score card. It will not use the fateful Vietnam-era language of light at the end of the tunnel, but it will say progress is under way and therefore more congressional patience is needed.

That said, the administration - particularly the vice-president, Dick Cheney - and the oil lobby are enraged that the oil law is stalled. The main reason is not that the Iraqi government and parliament are a lazy bunch of Islamist incompetents or narrow-minded sectarians, as is often implied. MPs are studying the law more carefully, and have begun to see it as a major threat to Iraq's national interest regardless of people's religion or sect.

This is the second bit of good news from Iraq. Civil society, trade unions, professional oil experts and the media are stirring on the oil issue and putting their points across to parliament in the way democracy is meant to work. The oil unions have held strikes even at the risk of having leaders and members arrested.

The pervasive outside image of Iraq as a country in free-fall where violence on a mass scale is an ever-present threat is not wrong. But it can mask the fact that "normal life" and indeed "normal politics" are still possible. The real reason why the Bush administration wanted the oil law rushed through was that it feared public discussion, and was worried that the more people understood what the law entails, the greater the chances of its defeat. Key parties in the Iraqi parliament oppose it, including the main Sunni party - which this week withdrew from government - as well as the Shia Sadrists and Fadhila.

Washington has promoted the law as a "reconciliation" issue, claiming its early passage would show that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian communities could share revenues on a fair basis. But this is a trick. Only one of the law's 43 articles mentions revenue-sharing, and then just to say that a separate "federal revenue law" will decide its distribution. The first draft of this other law only appeared in June, and it is clearly unreasonable to expect the Iraqi parliament to pass it in less than two months.

The law that Washington and the US oil lobby really want would set the arrangements for foreign companies to operate in Iraq's oil sector. Independent analysts say the terms being proposed are far more favourable for foreign oil companies than those of any other oil-producing state in the region, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. They all impose some safeguards for the national interest, whether it is having a national company that controls production; specifying in contracts the maximum level of foreigners' profits; limiting foreigners to a small number of fields; or insisting that disputes are arbitrated in local rather than international tribunals. Other big oil countries, including Russia and Venezuela, insist on parliamentary approval for contracts covering "strategic" fields or for joint ventures.

Platform, an oil industry watchdog, warns that the Iraq oil and gas law could "sign away Iraq's future". Greg Muttitt, its co-director, says: "The law is permissive. All of Iraq's unexploited and as yet unknown reserves, which could amount to between 100bn and 200bn barrels, would go to foreign companies."

Public pressure has already brought some changes. The first drafts of 2006 talked of production-sharing agreements, a system of concessions like those Russia gave to foreign oil companies in the days of proto-capitalist weakness in the early 1990s, and which Moscow no longer uses. The latest Iraqi drafts now talk of "exploration risk contracts". They could last for 30 years without a chance of revision, and be equally bad.

One of the most significant aspects of Iraqi society's awakening on the issue is a recent letter to parliament from 106 Iraqi oil industry technocrats, including exiles who fled the Saddam regime. They argue that there is no need to rush the law, since at a time of insecurity no foreign investment is likely. They want parliament to have the right of scrutiny of proposed contracts with the national oil company. They propose passing the revenue-sharing law before the oil law, and not vice versa - an eminently sensible view that Bush should adopt.

Whether the issue came up in Camp David this week is unclear, but the British government's role - like that of most western governments - has not been good. Working closely with the Americans, British officials in Baghdad saw drafts of the law before the Iraqi parliament. Britain supports the IMF line that Iraq's final tranche of Saddam-era debts cannot be forgiven until Iraq has a law permitting foreigners a role in the oil industry.

As a staunch supporter of the current international financial architecture, Gordon Brown is unlikely to press for a relaxation of these unfair terms. More's the pity, since the best way for Iraq to prosper once the occupation is over and it finally solves its sectarian crisis is to have maximum control over its major natural resource. Most Iraqis believe the invasion of 2003 was largely about oil. Peace is also about oil, and it surely makes sense not to let the panic and distraction of the current security crisis be used as a cover for handing the country's wealth to foreigners.

Chris Hedges says that Iraq is "beyond disaster".

The war in Iraq is about to get worse-much worse. The Democrats’ decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.

Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books. It will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground. There are two million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another two million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible. Iraq is in a state of anarchy. The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions. But wait until we leave.

It was not supposed to turn out like this. Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News? They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.

There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States-people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.

This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation. The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool-all ensured a swift descent into chaos. But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police.

Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia. Iraq has oil-lots of it. It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water. And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states. The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive. But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave. A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries. The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed. The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world. Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias. This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq. No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die. And it is our fault.

The neoconservatives-and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons’ useful idiots when it comes to Iran-have learned nothing. They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes. Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict. Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war-especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do. There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal “war of aggression.”

The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies-the Islamic terrorists-and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us. It has scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states. It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation. This is what George W. Bush and all those “reluctant hawks” who supported him have bequeathed us.

What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.

The Times reports that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has held its first military exercise (noting that competition for energy resources is the driving factor).

Russian and Chinese troops are joining forces this week in the first military exercises by an international organisation that is regarded in some quarters as a potential rival to Nato.

Thousands of soldiers and 500 combat vehicles will take part in “Peace Mission 2007”, organised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. Russian officials have also proposed an alliance between the SCO and a body representing most of the former Soviet republics.

Scores of Russian and Chinese aircraft begin joint exercises tomorrow before a week of military manoeuvres from Thursday that will include Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. At least 6,500 troops are involved in what is described as an antiterror exercise. ...

Igor Ivanov, the head of Russian security, played down concerns in May that the SCO was evolving into a military alliance to counter the expansion of Nato into Asia as part of the War on Terror. But MPs on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee expressed fears last year that the West could be on a collision course in the struggle for energy resources with “an authoritarian bloc opposed to democracy” that was based on an alliance between China and Russia.

A newly assertive Russia, flush with oil and gas revenues, is moving rapidly to increase its military capability amid tensions with the West over missile defence and Nato expansion. Almost £100 billion has been set aside for rearmament over the next eight years.

Links:

* Houston Chronicle - Seeking a sorghum solution. Another biofuel contender.
* TreeHugger - Fish Farm Taps Biodiesel From Fish Guts
* Tom Whipple - Peak Oil Review - August 6, 2007
* Business 2.0 - World's first carbon-free city. Masdar in Abu Dhabi.
* YouTube - GENI: There Is No Energy Crisis, There is a Crisis of Ignorance
* The Australian - Fretilin fury as Gusmao made PM. Our history as the colonial power in PNG was pretty poor and our effort in East Timor isn't looking much better.
* The Age - Cate campaigns on climate
* UPI - Analysis: Venezuela's oil takeover. A shortage of drilling rigs ?
* Washington Post - Chávez Taps Oil Wealth in Effort to Build System That Favors 'Human Necessities'
* IHT - Cuba pays more than half of Venezuela oil bill in services
* Bloomberg - Venezuela `Oil Socialism' Boosts Income $5.8 Billion. Chavez says foreign extraction from the Orinoco belt heavy oil fields was `like killing a whole cow to take only the filet'.
* Startup Toolbox - Peak Technology- and You Thought Peak Oil Was a Problem
* AllAFrica.com - Kenya: Darkness in the Slums
* Grist - The best clean-tech book
* Grist - An interview with Bill Richardson
* Grist - House passes ambitious energy bill, Bush threatens veto
* Technology Review - The Energy Bill and Plug-In Hybrids
* Technology Review - Seals Gather New Ocean Data
* Technology Review - The Incapacitating Flashlight. The visual equivalent of the "brown note". Normally I'm enthusiastic about LED technology but I can't see much good coming from this.
* Matthew Rothschild - Bush’s Executive Order on Lebanon Even Worse than the One on Iraq
* Cryptogon - UK: Children as Young as Five to be Fingerprinted in Schools. Start them young enough and they'll think its normal - Orwell keeps rolling in his grave.
* Wired - Analysis: New Law Gives Government Six Months to Turn Internet and Phone Systems into Permanent Spying Architecture
* Austin American Statesman - William Gibson's 'Spook Country'