I've noticed a few articles in recent times suggesting there are moves afoot to reopen the Panguna copper mine on Bougainville island (Bougainville is part of Papua New Guinea) - Bougainville consultations on mine re-opening set to widen (Radio Australia), Media Told To Report Facts About Bougainville (Scoop.co.nz) and Sandline mercenary crisis – Singirok reflects 14 years on (Pacific.scoop).

A PNG based blog called "Tubuans & Dukduks" has a look at the link between the native revolt on Bougainville Island a decade ago and the movie Avatar (generally viewed as more of a fable about the Iraq war, though Bougainville seems far more jungle planet than the oil covering deserts of the middle east) - Avatar and Bougainville: A Parallel History?.

When I first watched Avatar, it was mooted to me that James Cameron had quite possibly publicly demonstrated his personal opionion on war, the US, Iraq, and of course oil. And then I read Omar Hamed’s article which undeniably ascerts that James Cameron created Avatar on the basis of the Bougainville conflict – a scenario that has resulted in an interesting article, of which I have included exercpts from.

Hamed claims that the highest grossing film of all time to date has blatant allusions to the historical drama of Bougainville that happened in our backyard 13 years ago. He states that the film’s names, plot and characters are almost direct references to the 1997 Bougainville crisis yet no one seems to have drawn the dots between science fiction and South Pacific fact.

Many people will be familiar with the story of Avatar. The story opens 150 years in the future. A human mining corporation, RDA, has come five light years from Earth to the ecologically pristine jungle wilderness of the planet Pandora to mine the mineral unobtanium.

The richest deposits of unobtanium lie buried deep within the ground of Pandora and directly below the home of an alien race known as the Na’vi. Jake Sully, an ex-United States marine turned mercenary, is sent out to spy on the aliens by controlling a genetically engineered Avatar.

The security commander of the RDA, Colonel Miles Quaritch, encourages Sully to win the trust of the Na’vi and entice them to relocate away from their home in a giant tree, so the RDA can mine the unobtanium. Before Sully is able to persuade the Na’vi to leave Hometree, Colonel Quaritch attacks Hometree and destroys it.

Scientists’ Mutiny

Sully (in Avatar form) and a crew of RDA scientists mutiny and join the Na’vi in their struggle to rid Pandora of the RDA. The endgame battle revolves around the Na’vi defending the sacred tree of souls and the vital connection it provides to their races culture, memories and the Pandoran equivalent of earth goddess Gaia. By the end of the film the RDA are defeated and in one of the closing scenes Sully and armed Na’vi watch over a column of sullen RDA miners and their mercenaries as they are forcibly put aboard a space shuttle destined for earth.

The events that inspired Avatar writer and producer James Cameron can only have been the long guerrilla war that scarred the Bougainville for a decade between 1988 and 1998. The armed revolt began in 1988 when a group of indigenous rebels stole explosives and sabotaged the electricity supply to the environmentally destructive Panguna copper and gold mine, opened in 1964 and controlled by the CRA, an Australian subsidy of UK mining giant Rio Tinto.

The Panguna mine was opened on land stolen from the Nasioi tribe and tailings were dumped in a nearby river, eliminating aquatic life and forcing 800 tribespeople to lose their land. For a decade, the Pacific conflict festered between the eco-guerrilla Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the ill-disciplined Papua New Guinea Defence Force.

Tight Blockade

The conflict caused the deaths of between 10,000 and 20,000 Bougainvilleans, as Australian-supplied gunships strafed rebel camps and civilian villages and a tight blockade left the islanders often without food or medical supplies and allowed malaria and tuberculosis to spread with impunity. The end of the conflict came in 1997 when the Papua New Guinea government hired Sandline International, a British mercenary outfit led by former British Army Colonel Tim Spicer, to destroy the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.

Sandline and the PNG government signed a secret US$36 million contract for Sandline to provide a military solution to the Bougainville crisis that would see Sandline supply new helicopter gunships and troopships and using a mixed mercenary and PNGDF strike force, overwhelm the BRA. However, as Spicer’s mercenaries landed in PNG and began training the PNGDF in preparation for the assault on Bougainville to reopen Panguna, the Weekend Australian journalist Mary-Louise O’Callaghan broke the story, precipitating a diplomatic crisis between PNG and Australia and widespread disgust from PNG civil society.

In the wake of Callaghan’s expose, the commander of the PNGDF, Jerry Singirok, led an army coup to force the government to cancel the contract, step aside and call new elections. Singirok went on national radio to tell the country he could not allow the government to send foreign mercenaries armed with high-powered rocket launchers to murder in Bougainville and then disarmed the Sandline mercenaries and imprisoned Spicer. As the crisis grew and student protests in Port Moresby escalated the government reluctantly resigned and the Sandline soldiers were deported.

NZ-Brokered Ceasefire

In 1998, a New Zealand-brokered ceasefire was negotiated and eventually the Autonomous Bougainville Government established. The Panguna mine remains closed and in the hands of the indigenous landowners yet foreign corporate interest in reopening the mine continues.

Cameron’s plot is almost a direct adaptation of the Bougainville crisis with only the most minor adjustments. The full scale attack on Hometree in Avatar is a fair estimation of the havoc that Spicer’s proposed gunship assault to open Panguna would have had on the Nasioi tribe.

In the climactic battle, Jake Sully leads an alliance of Na’vi tribes aided by an uprising of Pandoran wildlife sent by their planets goddess of life, Eywa. Sully then lands on the back of the RDA space-shuttle turned carpet-bomber and uses a grenade to spin it off its flight path, thus preventing it from destroying the sacred tree of souls.

The scenario nicely symbolises how Jerry Singirok’s coup blew apart the PNG governments plan to rain death and destruction over Bougainville, in tandem with student and union protests escalating into anti-government riots and a parliamentary siege. This uprising eventually forced Sandline to divert the flight-plan of the world’s largest cargo plane, filled with grenade launchers, mortars and ammunition.

Singirok’s Coup

Cameron has infused his film Avatar with so many allusions to the Bougainville conflict that it beggars belief that only a few have picked up on it. For example, a quick reshuffle and a little transposing of the letters in “Miles Quaritch” and we get something very similar to “I am Tim Spicer”.

Coincidentally Cameron was developing the script a good 13 years ago – the same time as CNN and BBC were broadcasting to the world Singirok’s coup against the Sandline contract. The story of Bougainville’s bloody eco-revolution, the Sandline crisis and the overthrow of unscrupulous and corrupted PNG politicians by army revolt was always going to make an excellent film.

Cameron has done justice to a little-known chapter of history that happened right here in the South Pacific. Yet just last October Rio Tinto’s Bougainville company was exploring with the new Bougainville government the possibility of reopening the Panguna mine. Of course, the indigenous landowners still vehemently oppose the reopening of the mine. The sequel to Avatar may be coming sooner than many predicted.

NOTE:

This article was written by Omar Hamed and can be found here.

The SMH has an article on plans to link a large scale hydro power project in Papua New Guinea to the Australian electricity grid - Origin resurrects plan for PNG hydro.

Origin Energy says it will sign an agreement with the governments of Papua New Guinea and Queensland to potentially support development of a large hydro-electricity project.

The 50:50 joint venture between Origin and PNG Sustainable Development Program Ltd could ultimately see the hydro plant built at PNG's Purari River, the nation's third largest waterway.

Under the plan, electricity from the project would be used to power villages in PNG and would be transmitted to Australia via Weipa to join the national electricity grid at Townsville.

Plans for such a project have been in existence since the 1970s, a company spokesman said, but have now been updated.

The governments of PNG and Queensland will on Wednesday sign a Memorandum of Cooperation with the joint venture company, PNG Energy Developments Ltd (PNG EDL) concerning the plans.

"Capturing the power of the existing river flows, the development under consideration would have the capacity to generate approximately 1800 MW (megawatts) of renewable baseload electricity," Origin said.

PNG EDL is currently evaluating the hydro-electric potential of Purari at Wabo, in the Gulf Province of PNG and about 350 km from Port Moresby.

By itself the run-off from the Wabo delta is about equal to one quarter of the run-off from all Australia’s waterways, and PNG’s highlands receive eight to 11 metres of rainfall each year, an Origin spokesman said.

If the project was completed it would supply into Queensland about five times more renewable power than currently generated in the state.Origin chief executive Grant King said in a statement that the ongoing assessment of the project was consistent with his company’s pursuit of renewable energy opportunities.

‘‘This would be the first project to deliver year-round baseload renewable energy into mainland Australia,’’ Mr King said in a statement.

The Business Spectator has an article on cost blow outs at Woodside and Exxon LNG plants - Woodside launches $2.5bn equity raising.

Woodside's decision to tap investors comes after a cost blow-out of up to $1.1 billion at its Pluto LNG project because of slower construction work. ...

Woodside said in November that it would cover the Pluto budget blow-out via the debt markets, asset sales and underwriting of its dividends. The company also said at the time that it may boost its stake in the joint venture Browse project if it could not agree on a development plan with its partners.

The project is currently 82 per cent complete and on track to deliver first LNG shipments in 2011, with a production capacity of 4.3 million tonnes per year.

Pluto is now the second LNG project in the Asia-Pacific region to see costs rise – a trend that could also haunt the other Australian LNG projects. ExxonMobil Corp, which approved its LNG project in Papua New Guinea last week, has raised the forecast cost for the project by about 15 per cent to $15 billion.

Gas deals in Australia and PNG seem to be the hot topic of the week - the latest one is Wheatstone customer TEP signing up another supplier in Papua New Guinea. The SMH reports - Tokyo latest to sign for PNG gas.

THE $US15 billion ($A16.2 billion) Papua New Guinea liquefied natural gas project has signed another off-take agreement, this time with Japan, as the joint-venture partners prepare to give the development the go-ahead today.

Joint-venture partners ExxonMobil (which owns 41.5 per cent), Oil Search (34 per cent) and Santos (17.7 per cent) told the market late yesterday that Tokyo Electric Power Company had signed on to receive 1.8 million tonnes of LNG annually over 20 years.

This was two days after TEPCO signed Australia's largest trade deal to receive 4.1 million tonnes of LNG from Chevron's Wheatstone project in Western Australia in an agreement worth a reported $90 billion.

The TEPCO/ExxonMobil deal provided further evidence that the PNG project would get the green light today and came after China's Sinopec said last week it would take 2 million tonnes a year from the 6.3 million tonnes-a-year project, which would deliver first gas by late 2013 or early 2014.

The Herald Sun reports that the PNG LNG project has signed a major customer - Chinese commit to PNG gas deal.

THE Papua New Guinea liquefied natural gas project, in which Santos and Oil Search are involved, has settled a deal with a Chinese company to take two million tonnes of LNG for 20 years.

The deal with China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), follows Oil Search's recent $895 million placement and a $40 million share purchase plan and sets the scene for a final investment decision on the huge project. Oil Search expects the partners, led by ExxonMobil, to make a decision next week.

It should also set the scene for final sales and purchase agreements with other Asian LNG buyers who have indicated their willingness to take 4.3 million tonnes of LNG, the balance of the project's planned output.

The PNG project will supply Sinopec through an LNG terminal it is building in China's Shandong province. The project is scheduled to start production in 2013 or early 2014 and the formal sales and purchase agreement maintains its apparent lead on Queensland's major proposed coal seam gas to LNG projects, which are also aiming to be in production in 2014.

The WSJ's Environmental Capital blog has a post on gas discoveries in PNG - Ample Archipelago: Papua New Guinea’s Gas Groove.

Papua New Guinea is shaping up to be one of the world’s hottest natural-gas plays.

That may seem like a pretty bold statement considering that the South Pacific nation produced a measly 5 billion cubic feet of natural-gas in 2006, and didn’t export any of it. (Texas consumes that much every 12 hours.)

But that’s all about to change. Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil announced it was pushing ahead with plans to build a huge liquefied natural gas export facilty in Papua New Guinea.

And on Tuesday, Australian-based InterOil Corp. announced it had drilled a massive gas well in its Antelope field. How massive? The well flowed at a rate of 705 million cubic feet of gas a day, which nearly doubled an earlier well in field that InterOil was so proud of they got Guiness to certify as a record setter. To help put in perspective just how big these wells are, Devon Energy recently bragged about a well in Louisiana that flowed at 30.7 million cubic feet a day.

Of course, Devon can just hook its well into a pipeline. The road for InterOil is a good deal bumpier. The company wants to build its own LNG export terminal, but it will need a partner to help cover the project’s $6 billion cost. Wayne Andrews, InterOil’s vice president of capital markets, told Environmental Capital that the company hopes to have a partner on board in “a few months,” but even assuming that happens, the project won’t be complete until 2014 or 2015.

It could be worth the wait. Papua New Guinea’s location positions it well to export gas to Japan, Korea and, eventually, India and China. That’s the same market being targeted by big Australian LNG projects like Chevron’s massive Gorgon project. Unlike most of those efforts, the Papua New Guinea fields are on shore and in relatively shallow, conventional basins, meaning they could have a cost advantage over the Australian projects.

And gas isn’t the only game in Papua New Guinea. InterOil’s well also produced 11,200 barrels a day of natural-gas condensate—essentially a very light crude oil.

Gas Today reports that Oil Search has begun looking for coal seam gas in PNG to supplement production from natural gas fields - Oil Search is on to find CSG in PNG.

Oil Search has been awarded seven exploration licences to investigate coal seam gas (CSG) potential in the Strickland Basin, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Oil Search has committed to spend approximately $A5.9 million over the next two years on evaluation of existing data as well as the drilling and sampling of three shallow wells.

The agreement between the PNG Government and Oil Search includes an option to extend the licences for an additional two years subject to relinquishments and an additional committed work program. Existing well data suggests the presence of thick coal layers and a large coal basin in the area of the licenses. The rank, gas content and producibility of the coals will be constrained by the proposed drilling program which is anticipated to reach a total depth of less than 900 m.

Oil Search Managing Director Peter Botten said “While substantial coal seams have been penetrated by previous petroleum wells in the Foreland area of PNG and estimated net coal thickness compares favourable to existing CSG projects globally, the potential for CSG in PNG has not been fully investigated. “Any successful discovery of CSG resources in PNG could be integrated with supply from nearby conventional gas fields, thereby reducing the risks for any development,” he said.

THE liquefied natural gas ''train gang'' rolls on after Oil Search said it hoped to add a third gas-processing train to the ExxonMobil-led Papua New Guinea LNG project.

It comes a week after Woodside's Don Voelte said work had begun on two extra LNG trains at its Pluto project off the West Australian coast, with locations for two more trains being considered. ...

Mr Botten said Oil Search had been granted seven exploration licences in PNG. If it proved to be a large gas resource, the joint venture would look to expand on the 6.3 million tonnes a year planned for the first two trains, he said. ''We have a number of our fields committed to PNG LNG, we have a number of our fields that aren't,'' he said. ''If we are successful in proving up our coal seam gas resource base, that resource base will be used to further fuel our gas expansion activities and hopefully those expansion activities will include a further train of LNG.''

Meanwhile, Mr Voelte has offered the use of a drilling rig to help stop the oil spill that began on Friday morning 250 kilometres off the West Australian coast. PTTEP Australasia, the Thai company that contracted the rig at the centre of the leak, has said it will take at least seven weeks to stop the leak. ''We have contacted the Government and have put all of Woodside's resources at their use if they want them,'' Mr Voelte said. ''We've got a rig they can take if they want a rig.''

Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Stirling Hinchcliffe, yesterday officially opened the Braemar 2 power station.

The 450MW coal seam gas-fired power station, near Dalby in southern Queensland, will provide 3 percent of the combined electricity requirements of Queensland and New South Wales and produce less than half the emissions of an equivalent-sized coal-fired power station. ...

The facility consists of three 150MW open-cycle, gas-fired generation units and 110km high-pressure pipeline network. It is managed by ERM Power and supplied with coal seam gas from Arrow Energy’s nearby fields.

Arrow is currently supplying gas to the station at an annualised rate of around 5.5 petajoules (PJ). This will ramp up over the next 12 months to 15 PJ. The Tipton West Joint Venture (70 percent Arrow, 30 percent Shell) will contribute 3.5 PJ/a and the Daandine Joint Venture (70 percent Arrow, 30 percent Shell) will supply 11.5 PJ/a under a 12-year gas sales agreement.

The power station will operate initially as a peak and shoulder period generator that will aim to dispatch electricity during periods of higher electricity demand and capture the associated higher electricity prices during that time.