Nuking The Tar Sands  

The Independent reports that Shell is considering the nuclear option in the Alberta tar sands fields.

Shell is considering using nuclear power to operate its controversial tar sands programme in Canada. Tar sands extraction – mining oil from a mixture of sand or clay, water and very heavy crude oil – uses a huge amount of energy and water. Environmentalists say it results in more than three times as many emissions of carbon dioxide compared to conventional oil production.

Now Canadian firms AECL and Energy Alberta have proposed building a nuclear reactor near the site of Shell’s vast Athabasca tar sands development. The boss of Energy Alberta has said the C$6bn (£2.8bn) reactor has the backing of a large unnamed copany that would take 70 per cent of the reactor’s energy.

A spokeswoman for Shell Canada refused to confirm that the company would take electricity from the reactor but said: “We have had a number of power options presented to us. Yes, it includes nuclear. “If a nuclear facility proceeds, we would look at it based on a wide range of factors such as economics, sustainability and the energy [required].” She added that the company was also looking at building biomass, renewable or co-generation plants. Analysts estimate that Canada’s huge tar sands give it the world’s second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

However, Walt Patterson, associate fellow at think-tank Chatham House, said: “Extracting oil from tar scares the pants off me. The whole idea is fundamentally perverse in the context of our present environmental situation. To then power it with nuclear, it seems to be the worst of all worlds.”

Well - the worst of all worlds is already happening - bootstrapping tar sands production using the lowest quality bitumen - its hard to see that using nuclear power is actually worse - from a global warming point of view its slightly better (albeit still disastrous).

And when did Chatham House become an environmental lobby group ?

The New York Times has an article on jatropha farming in Mali.

When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy. “I thought it was a plant for old ladies to make soap,” he said.

But now that a plant called jatropha is being hailed by scientists and policy makers as a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels. By planting a row of jatropha for every seven rows of regular crops, Mr. Banani could double his income on the field in the first year and lose none of his usual yield from his field.

Poor farmers living on a wide band of land on both sides of the equator are planting it on millions of acres, hoping to turn their rockiest, most unproductive fields into a biofuel boom. They are spurred on by big oil companies like BP and the British biofuel giant D1 Oils, which are investing millions of dollars in jatropha cultivation.

Countries like India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia are starting huge plantations, betting that jatropha will help them to become more energy independent and even export biofuel. It is too soon to say whether jatropha will be viable as a commercial biofuel, scientists say, and farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds.

But here in Mali, one of the poorest nations on earth, a number of small-scale projects aimed at solving local problems — the lack of electricity and rural poverty — are blossoming across the country to use the existing supply of jatropha to fuel specially modified generators in villages far off the electrical grid. “We are focused on solving our own energy problems and reducing poverty,” said Aboubacar Samaké, director of a government project aimed at promoting renewable energy. “If it helps the world, that is good, too.” ...

Jatropha’s proponents say it avoids the major pitfalls of other biofuels, which pose significant environmental and social risks. Places that struggle to feed their populations, like Mali and the rest of the arid Sahel region, can scarcely afford to give up cultivable land for growing biofuel crops. Other potential biofuels, like palm oil, have encountered resistance by environmentalists because plantations have encroached on rain forests and other natural habitats.

But jatropha can grow on virtually barren land with relatively little rainfall, so it can be planted in places where food does not grow well. It can also be planted beside other crops farmers grow here, like millet, peanuts and beans, without substantially reducing the yield of the fields; it may even help improve output of food crops by, among other things, preventing erosion and keeping animals out.

Other biofuels like ethanol from corn and sugar cane require large amounts of water and fertilizer, and factory farming in some cases consumes substantial amounts of petroleum, making the environmental benefits limited, critics say. But jatropha requires no pesticides, Mr. Samaké said, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts.

The Age has a look at the global wheat crop in "fields of dreams".

Grain growers across Australia are praying for September rains, which will mean the difference between a record payout and disaster. All through central and north-western Victoria, on the swathes of Western Australia's wheat belt, and from NSW's Riverina to the Queensland border, vast fields of green hold the promise of a bountiful grains harvest. If spring rains fall soon, soaking deep into the subsoil and energising these tentative shoots, Australia's wheat farmers might be in for a decent year.

That is, might be. Wheat prices have skyrocketed to record highs on the Chicago Board of Trade in the past two weeks after Canada confirmed that drought conditions in July spoiled its harvest, cutting the likely output by one-fifth. Supply has tightened in Europe due to both adverse weather and fears that Russia will curb its grain exports. And with global wheat stocks at record lows, the world is hankering to get its hands on whatever Australia's farmers can export. If it were any other year, all portents would be for a good outcome for local farmers. But scrape away the topsoil and it is a different, and far more worrying, story. ...

Just a few months ago the rich red soils of the Mallee, the heavy black soils of western Victoria and the plains of western and central NSW were saturated, triggering a rash of optimism and lots of wheat planting. But since then, rain bands have mostly evaded north-western Victoria, central NSW, and almost completely bypassed much of South Australia and the northern fringes of the WA growing areas.

Now analysts are cutting harvest forecasts. Malcolm Bartholomaeus, who writes a grains report for Callum Downs Commodity News, expects only 18 million tonnes when the combine harvesters head into the fields in December and January - and that is predicated on at least average rainfall over the next month or so. If rains don't come, he has warned the harvest may fall to 15 million tonnes.

That is a long way from the 25.4 million tonnes harvested in 2005-06 and well below the US Department of Agriculture's current estimate of 23 million tonnes. ...

Around the world, wheat stocks are estimated at just 114 million tonnes - the lowest since 1981 - and with so many of the northern hemisphere's wheat harvests damaged by drought, wheat buyers perceived Australia and Argentina as the solution to tight supply conditions.

Australia needs about 6 million tonnes to supply the local market, and the balance is shipped to buyers in Japan, Sudan, Yemen, South Korea, Egypt and several other Asian countries to make flat breads and noodles. But Australia hardly has any stored in its silos either: "We will be as close to an empty cupboard as we have ever been by December," Storey said. "We are now in a spiral-up situation (on prices)," he said. "We pretty well know how much wheat the world has got available between now and next July, and it (price pressure) will be severe, I think. We have never seen these prices before, at almost $US8 a bushel, and the only thing that will stop it is when consumers pull out."

Having said that, Storey pointed out that on each occasion when wheat prices had soared - in 1973, 1980 and 1996 when they briefly touched $US7 a bushel - the spike was brief and the correction was sharp.

It's not only the wheat industry that is affected by dry conditions; around the world, prices for barley and corn are rising. And to make matters worse, the grains industry is facing a long-term squeeze from an unexpected angle. As more US consumers switch from petroleum products to biofuels, more of the US corn crop is sold to ethanol producers, and that puts pressure on stockfeed producers who are forced to supplement their product with other grains including low-grade wheat.

As Petreaus's report on "the surge" is treated with disbelief in Washington, Joshua Holland takes yet another look at what the Iraq war is about - "The Battle for Iraq is About Oil and Democracy, Not Religion!".

This week, we'll be buried under a crush of analysis about an Iraq that's being ravaged by a religious civil war -- an incomprehensible war between "militants" of various stripes and "the Iraqi people." But Americans will be poorly served by the media's singular focus on Iraq's "sectarian violence." It obscures the fact that sectarian fighting is a symptom -- a street-level manifestation -- of a massive political conflict over what kind of country Iraq will be, who will rule it and who will control its enormous oil wealth.

And it obscures the great irony of the American project: that in that defining conflict over the future of the country, the Bush administration, with the support of Congress, has taken the same side as Iran's hardliners and the same side as the Sunni fundamentalist group called al Qaeda in Iraq. All are working -- separately, but towards the same ends -- against the wishes of a majority of Iraqis, who polls show want a united, sovereign country in control of its own resources and free of meddling by Washington, Tehran and other foreigners.

Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died violent deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many of them as a result of the civil conflicts that have pitted Iraqi against Iraqi. But those conflicts have nothing to do with the differences that distinguish the different branches of Islam -- Iraq isn't struggling with a religious civil war.

Iraqis are fighting over fundamental questions about the future of their country. They're fighting over whether it will have a strong central government or be a weak confederation of semiautonomous states, over how soon and to what degree it will be independent of foreign influence, over who will control its massive energy reserves and under what terms they will be developed -- all of these things are tangible, concrete issues that are crucial in determining Iraq's future.

We refer to this central political conflict as one between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Loosely speaking, separatists favor a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least three zones with strong regional governments, similar to the semiautonomous Kurdish "state" in Northern Iraq; they are at least willing to tolerate foreign influence -- meaning Iranian, U.S. or other powers' influence, depending on which group one is discussing -- for the foreseeable future; they favor privatizing Iraq's massive energy reserves and ceding substantial control of the country's oil sector to regional authorities.

Nationalists are just the opposite: They reject any foreign interference in Iraq's affairs, they favor a strong technocratic central government in Baghdad that's not based on sectarian voting blocs and they oppose privatizing Iraq's oil and natural gas reserves on the extraordinarily generous terms (to the oil companies) proposed by the U.S. government and institutions like the IMF. They favor centralized control over the development of Iraq's oil and gas reserves.

Links:

* Index Research - Iraq Oil: The Vultures are Waiting
* New York Times - Mexican Rebels Claim Pipeline Attacks. Someone sure seems keen to knock out Mexican energy supplies (which will no doubt have numerous knock on effects if it gets severe enough).
* Reuters - Mexico: Insurgents Attack Six Oil and Gas Pipelines
* ENS - Tribes Sabotage Kirkuk Pipelines
* MSNBC - Gazprom pushes Exxon to drop China export plans
* The Australian - Gazprom talks LNG swaps with Australian companies
* Biopact - Italian start-up to produce biopolymers from sugar beet and cane residues with 95% efficiency
* LA Times - A Fading Superpower ?
* Daily Kos - America's Imperial Crisis
* Daily Reckoning - Comparison Between World War II and ‘War on Terror’ a Fantasy
* YouTube - Ron Paul and Bill O'Reilly Duke It Out. Trying to talk sense to a lunatic (and one totally lacking in manners - "why don't you ever let me answer the question ?" asks Paul).
* AP - Chris Dodd: Dad's Nuremberg notes apply today
* Pittsburgh Post Gazette - Salt water as fuel? Erie man hopes so. I've seen quite a few these stories over the past couple of years.