Local readers might like to check out this years Syndey bike bilm festival, starting on Wednesday - Bicycle Film Festival.

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. He insisted on turning his negative experience into a positive one. In 2001 Barbur started the Bicycle Film Festival as a platform to celebrate the bicycle through music, art and, of course, film.

The Bicycle Film Festival has been a major catalyst for the urban bike movement, one of the most powerful and culturally relevant forces of the last decade. The BFF is sure to carry this momentum into the next decade.

Reuters has a report on the latest IEA world energy outlook, which is starting to accept that the peak of crude oil production could have already occurred as a real possibility - IEA sees oil supply peak looming, ups price view. The Oil Drum has a summary of questionable assumptions an omissions - .

Global oil supplies will come close to a peak by 2035 when oil prices will exceed $200 a barrel, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday, as China and other emerging economies drive demand higher.

The IEA, in its 2010 World Energy Outlook, said conventional crude oil output had already peaked and would flatten out in the next 10 years, boosting reliance on costlier and more polluting unconventional sources such as oil sands.

"Production in total does not peak before 2035, though it comes close to doing so," the IEA said in the executive summary of the report. That projection was according to the report's central case, the New Policies scenario.

The Paris-based IEA, which advises 28 industrialised countries, also raised its mid- and long-term oil price forecasts, despite slashing oil demand estimates by 2035, citing growing supply uncertainty.

Oil prices would rise even further if governments did not act to curb consumption, the IEA's chief economist and lead author of the report, Fatih Birol, told Reuters in an interview.

"The message is clear, the price will go up, especially if consuming countries do not make changes in the way they consume oil, especially in the transport sector," Birol said.

Oil hit $87.63 a barrel on Tuesday, the highest since October 2008, after hovering around $70-80 most of the year.

The world needed higher oil prices to change consuming habits substantially and spur investment as markets were becoming less sensitive to price changes, Birol said.

Public debate about the future of oil tends to focus on when conventional crude oil production is likely to peak and how quickly it will decline as resource depletion passes a certain point. Those who argue that an oil peak is imminent base their arguments largely on the indisputable fact that the resource base is finite. It is held that once we have depleted half of all the oil that can ever be recovered, technically and economically, production will enter a period of long-term decline.

What is often missing from the debate is the other side of the story — demand — and the key variable in the middle — price. How much capacity is available to produce oil at any given moment depends on past investment. Decisions by oil companies on how much and where to invest are influenced by a host of factors, but one of the most important is price (at least relative to cost). And price is ultimately the result of the balance between demand and supply (setting aside short-term fluctuations that may have as much to do with financial markets than with oil-market fundamentals). In short, if demand rises relative to supply capacity, prices typically rise, bringing forth more investment and an expansion of capacity, albeit usually with a lag of several years.

Another misconception is that the amount of recoverable oil is fixed. The amount of oil that was ever in the ground — oil originally in place, to use the industry term — certainly is a fixed quantity, but we have only a fairly vague notion of just how big that number is. But, critically, how much of that volume will eventually prove to be recoverable is also uncertain, as it depends on technology, which will certainly improve, and price, which is likely to rise: the higher the price, the more oil can be recovered profitably. An increase of just 1% in the average recovery factor at existing fields would add more than 80 billion barrels to recoverable resources (IEA, 2008). So, the chances are that the volume of resources that prove to be recoverable will be bigger than the mean estimate we use to project production, especially since that estimate does not include all areas of the world. Even if conventional crude oil
production does peak in the near future, resources of NGLs and unconventional oil are, in principle, large enough to keep total oil production rising for several decades.

Clearly, global oil production will peak one day. But that peak will be determined by factors on both the demand and supply sides. We project a peak before 2020 in the 450 Scenario. In the New Policies Scenario, production in total does not peak before 2035, though it comes close to doing so, conventional crude oil production in that scenario holding steady at 68-69 mb/d over the entire projection period and never attaining its all-time peak of 70 mb/d in 2006. In other words, if governments put in place the energy and climate policies to which they have committed themselves, as we assume in this scenario, then our analysis suggests that crude oil production has probably already peaked.

If governments act vigorously now to encourage more efficient use of oil and the development of alternatives, then demand for oil might begin to ease quite soon and we might see a fairly early peak in oil production. That peak would not be caused by any resource constraint. But if governments do nothing or little more than at present, then demand will continue to increase, the economic burden of oil use will grow, vulnerability to supply disruptions will increase and the global environment will suffer serious damage. The peak in oil production will come then not as an invited guest, but as the spectre at the feast.

TreeHugger has a post on a potential drawback of one proposed geoengineering strategy - Ocean Iron Fertilization Could Stimulate Toxic Algae Blooms in Open Ocean.

There's no doubt that geoengineering brings out passionate emotions both pro and con, as recent debate on TreeHugger about the sort of-moratorium on some research coming out of the Convention on Biological Diversity amply illustrates. Backing up the caution side (which I admit I'm firmly a part of) is a new piece of research coming from UC Santa Cruz, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows that a toxin-producing algae normally thought limited to coastal waters (and perhaps partial inspiration for The Birds) can be stimulated to grow rapidly in the open ocean when iron from natural or artificial sources is present.

Science Codex sums up the nut of it:

Blooms of diatoms in the genus Pseudo-nitschia, which produce a neurotoxin called domoic acid, are a regular occurrence in coastal waters. During large blooms, the algal toxin enters the food chain, forcing the closure of some fisheries (such as shellfish and sardines) and poisoning marine mammals and birds that feed on contaminated fish. But until now, blooms of these algae in the open ocean have attracted little attention from researchers.

Study lead author, Mary Silver says that normally pseudo-nitschia don't have much effect, but "these species are incredibly responsive to iron, often becoming dominant in algal blooms that result from iron fertilization. Any iron input might cause a bloom of the cells that make the toxin." Silver adds that natural deposits of iron in the open ocean (from volcanic eruptions, dust storms, etc) have occurred for millions of years, but are sporadic occurrences.

"To do iron enrichment on a large scale could be dangerous," Silver notes, "because, if it causes blooms of pseudo-nitschia, the toxin will get into the food chain, as it does in the coastal zone."

The Business Spectator has a report on efforts to improve solar power technology - Australian solar put to the test.

Can solar energy really match the price of fossil-fuelled electricity?

Our piece citing a report by consulting group AT Kearney in Germany on Friday raised a few eyebrows, but there was Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Sunday announcing a new partnership with the United States that aimed to cut the cost of solar to that of conventional sources.

This is what she said: “(This project) is part of an aggressive effort to bring the sales price of solar technology down by two to four times, down to the point where the price of electricity from solar is comparable to electricity generated from conventional sources.

“Now this is an ambitious goal, but anyone who has stood under the Australian sun, even here in Melbourne where sometimes we see (it) and sometimes we don't, knows how much we stand to gain in we can do this.”

It’s not entirely clear what comparisons Gillard is using – rooftop PV vs coal or utility scale solar vs coal and gas – and grid parity suggests different things to different people. It has, however, long been the holy grail of solar technology developers.

The industry argues it has already reached grid parity in countries such as Italy, which has good sun and high retail energy prices, and islands such as Hawaii that rely on expensive diesel. Despite a 50 per cent fall in PV prices in the past year, it’s considered a distant dream in Australia.

Lend Lease and AGL believe utility scale solar PV will hit a crossover point with wind as soon as 2014. But to match coal or gas – even with a carbon price – is another matter. But if it happens, it is a potential game changer for the future of the energy industry in this country.

So what is behind the idea that the price of solar can be cut by a factor of four? The project announced by Australia and the US – although mostly funded here – will focus on several new so called “third generation” solar PV technologies, including dual-junction photovoltaic devices, hot-carrier solar cells and – in solar thermal – high-temperature receivers, all of which have the potential to achieve quantum shifts in the level of solar energy efficiency.

Mark Twidell, the head of the Australian Solar Institute, which will manage the $50 million in new funding promised by the Australian government, said dual and multi-function PV devices have shown the potential to more than double the efficiency of PV cells, reaching efficiency rates of up to 45 per cent in university testing, which compares to less than 20 per cent for most silicon-based PV panels currently in use.

The higher rates are achieved through new coatings that can use more parts of the light spectrum. The significance of such a high efficiency rate is that it means less land, less steel, less concrete, and fewer cells, are required to generate the same amount of energy.

Hot-carrier solar cells are designed to improve the conversion rates of solar cells. In the simplest terms, the focus here is to try and herd the electrons and push more of them through with the flow of the current, rather than just having them jumping up and down in the same place and not being converted into energy. The potential is to increase efficiency and to try and do it with low cost materials.

High temperature receivers are used in solar thermal technology, and are designed to maximise the temperature that can be generated in solar thermal plants, potentially to the same level as the steam generated in coal-fired power stations. That would increase their efficiency and lower their costs by considerable margins.

The project with the US represents a 50 per cent increase in funding for the ASI, which is charged with chaperoning new technologies in the solar industry and helping to get them to the point where they can be commercially exploited.

The ASI next week will unveil its strategic plan, which will focus on areas such as R&D, skills development, knowledge sharing, administration and sustaining the future.

“Our mission is to accelerate the commercial deployment of our solar technology,” Twidell said. “It would be great to look back in 20 years time and see those technologies widely deployed in the market."

The Climate Spectator has a look at the upcoming launch of Dow's "solar shingles" roofing product - A new direction for American solar ?.

As Dow Chemical prepares to launch its solar shingle in 2011, Wall Street is hopeful the product will push the largest US chemical maker into an entirely new, lucrative market.

Dow expects its solar shingle, which installs on roofs like ordinary shingles but can generate electricity from sunlight, to net $US1 billion in revenue by 2015 in a roughly $US5 billion market.

Dow reported 2009 revenue of $US44.88 billion.

More than revenue, though, is the opportunity for Dow to move beyond its image as just a chemical company, albeit the largest in the United States, and help push solar power to a broad segment of the American population that for years has eschewed it as too expensive and cumbersome.

"Obviously, looking at where energy prices are today and the high-double-digit growth rate that solar's been exhibiting, it's clearly a product that should have appeal," said Hassan Ahmed, a chemical analyst at Alembic Global Advisors.

The company declined to provide the per-unit cost for its shingle, which connects in series on slanted roofs and feeds direct current to a converter box, where it is turned into alternating current.

However, Dow executives estimate that it could cost about $US6,000 to install a solar shingle system that provides half of an average home's power. That figure takes into account a 30 per cent federal tax solar rebate and local and state rebates, which widely vary. New Jersey, for instance, has a large solar rebate program.

The $US6,000 figure seems low, according to Rob Stone, a solar industry analyst with Cowen & Co, compared with the industry average of about $10,000 for solar installation.

"Dow's own materials basically say you can pay off the cost of putting on your solar shingles in about 10 years," he said. "That's a little bit on the longish end of the payback that people generally expect. Probably a seven-year payback is generally the sweet spot."

New Scientist has an article by Michael Mann on the anti-climate science campaign in the US - Professional climate change deniers' crusade continues (via Bruce).

I'D LIKE to say I was surprised when news broke a year ago that emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, had been hacked into and leaked, and that scientists' personal emails were being quoted out of context to disingenuously imply impropriety on their part. But I wasn't.

Books such as Merchants of Doubt by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have detailed how front groups for the fossil-fuel industry have been waging an orchestrated, well-funded campaign against climate science and climate scientists for more than two decades. Hacking into the CRU's email was simply the latest skirmish in this war against science, timed to forestall any progress towards lowering carbon emissions at the Copenhagen climate conference being held about a month later.

In January this year, the state of Virginia swore in Ken Cuccinelli as its attorney general. Cuccinelli was already known to have a radical agenda that included trying to end protection of the rights of gay college students. This agenda soon proved to extend in other directions, too.

In February, Cuccinelli filed a request with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about its findings that greenhouse gases endanger public health. He said that he was also looking for judicial review in the federal court. As his press statement explained, he took issue with "unelected bureaucrats with political agendas", who, he alleged, were using "falsified" data to regulate US industry and destroy the economy.

A few weeks later, on 1 April, Cuccinelli announced - and despite the date, he wasn't joking - that he planned to challenge the March 2010 standards on fuel efficiency for cars and trucks that had been finalised by the Obama administration and the EPA. He also issued a civil subpoena to my former employer, the University of Virginia, demanding that they hand over 10 years' worth of emails and documents of mine, including correspondence with more than 30 other leading climate scientists.

The intent was clear: in my view, it was to uncover yet more emails that climate change deniers hoped would further embarrass climate scientists.

So why the ongoing attacks against me by Cuccinelli and other groups and individuals doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry? Undoubtedly, it is because of the prominent role our now decade-old "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperature trends has played in public discourse on climate change. The graphic, which I helped to create while I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts, tells a simple story: that the warming of recent decades is unprecedented in at least a millennium. This has made it a compelling icon in the climate change debate. It has also made the graphic a compelling target for climate change deniers, who believe that they can discredit all climate science by undermining the credibility of this one graphic.

The problem for them, however, is that dozens of groups, using different statistical methods, different data sources, and so on, have all come to the same conclusion as our study: recent warming is anomalous in a long-term context. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 report extended the period of warming back even further to at least the past 1300 years.

Moreover, the case for human influence on climate change hardly rests on our palaeoclimate research, or even on the entire field of palaeoclimatology. It is based, instead, on multiple lines of evidence and, in particular, the match between modern observations and the predictions of simulations using climate models.

The BBChas an article on a tidal power pilot in the Humber Estuary (the numbers below should probably read 1 MW rather than 1,000 MW) - Humber tidal project passes power tests.

A major step forward in using the tidal power of the Humber estuary to generate electricity has been completed by engineers.

Neptune Renewable Energy has said it produced power from its demonstration unit at Hull's Albert dock following three months of tests.

Now engineers are preparing to install a commercial site at Sammy's Point in the Humber estuary in early 2011.

Power from that will be used to run The Deep aquarium in Hull.

The Proteus NP 1000 tidal stream power generator weighs more than 150 tonnes and will be 20m (65ft) in length. It is made of steel buoyancy hulls carrying a turbine and 6m (19ft) rotors.

Engineers from the firm believe, that based on the dock tests, the system would be able to generate at least 1,000 megawatts and claim this could meet the energy needs of more than 500 homes.

The SMH has an article on the maintenance nightmare that is BP's ALaskan oil pipeline system - BP's Alaska pipelines in danger of rupturing.

The huge pipeline system that moves oil, gas and waste between BP's operations in Alaska is plagued by severe corrosion, an internal maintenance report says.

The document, obtained by the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica, shows that as of October 1, at least 148 BP pipelines on Alaska's North Slope received an ''F-rank'' from the company.

BP workers say this means inspections have found that more than 80 per cent of the pipe wall is corroded and could rupture.

Most of the pipelines carry toxic or flammable substances. The document says many metal walls of the F-ranked pipes are worn within millimetres of bursting, risking an explosion or spills.

BP oil workers say the company's fire and gas warning systems are unreliable, that the giant turbines that pump oil and gas through the system are ageing and that some oil and waste holding tanks are verging on collapse.

EETimes has an article on recent comments by Vinod Khosla deprecating the smart meter market and saying the real money in smart grids will be in transforming the infrastructure of the grid itself - Smart grid money not at home, says Khosla.

Cybersecurity will be the killer app for smart electric grids, and it will require a new generation of power electronics technology, according to Vinod Khosla.

The veteran venture capitalist said the conventional wisdom about smart grids is all wrong. It is not about smart meters delivering real-time information about electricity pricing to consumers.

Changes in consumers' use patterns could result in 5 to 15 percent reductions in electricity use. But those small gains could be cut in half with the development of more energy efficient appliances, said Khosla.

"Suddenly, demand-response applications won't have a payback," he said in a talk at the Greenbeat conference here. "If you have highly efficient systems, energy storage or distributed generation, you don’t need demand response," he added.

The real driver for smart grids is the need for a more flexible and reliable electric grid, so that a falling tree that takes out power lines in Ohio does not create a blackout in New York City, he said. "What if a Russian hack-athon brought down 20 million U.S. homes with a competition based on the winner is the one who cuts electricity to the most homes," he asked, sharpening his point.

To create a more robust, self-healing electric grid, developers need a new generation of digital, networked components, Khosla said.

"We need a whole new class of devices and systems," said Khosla."A 50 year-old transformer made of copper wire wound around a ferrite core, can't respond to a signal, so we can't control it," he said.

"If we invest in new power electronics devices, things will change radically over the next five to ten years," he said. "The design of existing systems will change based on these new components," he added.

Khosla challenged the findings of a McKinsey study that said the smart grid could reap roughly equal savings by 2019 of about $60 billion each in the home and in the back-end grid. The potential savings in the home are likely to be a fraction of that figure while the back-end network savings could be much higher, he argued.

"We have to re-do the core infrastructure of the grid that has tens and hundreds of billions of investments in it," said Khosla.

Technology Review has a look at the US rare earth mining industry - Can the U.S. Rare-Earth Industry Rebound?.

Rare-earth elements were obscure until the past year, when China, their primary producer, tightened export quotas on the materials. Rare-earth elements are used in a multitude of technologies, including magnets for wind turbines, hybrid-car batteries, fluorescent lightbulbs, and hard drives.

China is not the only country with significant reserves of these valuable materials; in fact, the U.S. was their primary producer until the 1990s, when the Chinese began undercutting the Americans on cost. Now companies in the U.S. and Australia are ramping up production at two rich sites for rare earths, but the process will take years. Getting from rocks to the pure metals and alloys required for manufacturing requires several steps that U.S. companies no longer have the infrastructure or the intellectual property to perform.

Contrary to their name, rare-earth metals are abundant in the Earth's crust, and significant reserves are concentrated in the United States, Australia, Brazil, and other countries. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are 13 million tons of extractable rare earths in the United States, 5.4 million in Australia, and 19 million in Russia and neighboring countries. In 2009, China had 36 million.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Mountain Pass mine in California produced over 70 percent of the world's supply. Yet in 2009, none were produced in the United States, and it will be difficult, costly, and time-consuming to ramp up again. "When you stop mining in this country, as investment goes down, expertise on cutting-edge technologies is exported as well," says Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. Rare-earth researcher Karl Geschneidner of the Ames National Laboratory in Iowa also sees a lack of what he calls "intellectual infrastructure" for rare-earth technology development in the United States.

The two mines that will be stepping up production soonest are Mountain Pass, being developed by Molycorp, and the Mount Weld mine, which is being developed by Lynas, outside Perth, Australia. Mountain Pass has the edge of already having been established. But the company cannot use the processes used in the mine's heyday: they're both economically and environmentally unsustainable.

Several factors make purification of rare earths complicated. First, the 17 elements all tend to occur together in the same mineral deposits, and because they have similar properties, it's difficult to separate them from one another. They also tend to occur in deposits with radioactive elements, particularly thorium and uranium. Those elements can become a threat if the "tailings," the slushy waste product of the first step in separating rare earths from the rocks they're found in, are not dealt with properly.

Mountain Pass went into decline in the 1990s when Chinese producers began to undercut the mine on price at the same time as it had safety issues with tailings. When the Mountain Pass mine was operating at full capacity, it produced 850 gallons of waste saltwater containing these radioactive elements every hour, every day of the year. The tailings were transported down an eleven-mile pipeline to evaporation ponds. In 1998, Mountain Pass, which was then owned by a subsidiary of oil company Unocal, had a problem with tailing leaks when the pipeline burst; four years later, the company's permit for storing the tailings lapsed.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, Chinese mines exploited their foothold in the rare-earth market. The Chinese began unearthing the elements as a byproduct of an iron-ore mine called Bayan Obo in the northern part of the country; getting both products from the same site helped keep prices low initially. And the country invested in R&D around rare-earth element processing, eventually opening several smaller mines, and then encouraging manufacturers that use these metals to set up facilities in the country.

Meanwhile, worldwide demand for rare-earth elements has been growing. This year demand was 125,000 tons; by 2015, it is expected to grow to 225,000 tons, and Molycorp spokesman Jim Sims notes that this projection does not include the wind-turbine industry, which is expected to be a major market. State-of-the-art wind turbines like those that will be installed at the world's largest wind farm, an 845-megawatt facility in Oregon, use high-efficiency rare-earth magnets. They can be 10 times lighter and smaller than comparable magnets but equally strong. Each of these magnets requires a ton of rare earths, Sims says.

Molycorp renewed the Mountain Pass mining permit and began R&D of its own in 2004. This year, using rock that was mined before a previous permit expired and new separation technologies it has developed, the company will sell 3,000 tons of rare earths. By 2012, Molycorp expects to produce 20,000 tons a year, and under its current mining permits could double capacity to 40,000 tons. Sims also says the company will produce rare-earth products at half the cost of the Chinese in 2012. According to the company, these savings will be made possible by several changes, such as eliminating the production of waste saltwater. Molycorp will use a closed-loop system, converting the waste back into the acids and bases required for separation and eliminating the need to buy such chemicals. The company will also install a natural-gas power cogeneration facility onsite to cut energy costs.

But Ames Lab's Geschneidner notes that one major source of cost in the separation process can't be eliminated--the fact that it simply takes a long time. Milled rock is shaken again and again in a mixture of solvents to separate the elements by weight; depending on the ultimate purity that's required, this must be done 10,000 to 100,000 times. The result is then sold as a concentrate or treated to produce rare-earth metal oxides.

Even if Molycorp does succeed in reducing the costs of separation by half, the next step in production may cause a hiccup. Rare-earth oxides and concentrates do have a market, for example as catalysts for the petroleum industry, but they can't be made into magnets. To make magnets, rare-earth oxides must first be converted into pure metals, a process that produces caustic byproducts, and is done solely in China today. Sims says that Molycorp is investigating pathways that are environmentally friendly and aren't covered under intellectual property owned by foreign companies. These metals must next be made into alloys suitable for the magnets, another capability that's concentrated overseas, mostly in Japan and Germany.

Giles Parkinson at the Climate Spectator has an article on Queensland based flow battery company RedFlow - Australian Cleantech: RedFlow.

Large-scale energy storage is one of those technologies that everyone reckons is a great idea, and almost essential for intermittent renewables, but then wonders if it will ever work. Or, more to the point, if it can work at a price that is readily affordable.

Over the next few weeks, Australian battery storage developer RedFlow will be out to demonstrate that its technology is both affordable and useful. It will be installing its large-scale zinc bromine flow batteries at the University of Queensland’s St Lucia campus in Brisbane, plugging into what will be the country’s largest (1.2MW) and most powerful solar photovoltaic generation system.

Its RedFlow 200 unit – using 48 zinc-bromine battery modules, which can deliver up to 400kwh of energy – will plug into a 390 kW section of the PV array during the daytime, and feed it back into the local network at the times when it is most needed. The PV array is situated atop car parking facilities, and will sit side-by-side with an identical array that will not have storage.

RedFlow CEO Phil Hutchings says it will be a world-first demonstration with solar PV at this scale, and will demonstrate how storage can guarantee supply during periodic power drops created by passing clouds, and then feed power back into the local network at evening peaks.

UQ researchers will also analyse the results to learn the impacts of large-scale energy storage on the local electricity network, its value in meeting peak demand and how to control power flow.

Hutchings says the RedFlow 200, which sells for around $600,000, is likely to have larger markets overseas, particularly in places like Hawaii which have to ship in fuel oil, have huge energy costs and are looking at different renewable and energy storage technologies.

But Hutchings says the units also offer a cost effective solution in Australia, particularly in rural areas where they offer cheaper solutions to local network upgrades needed by the surge in electronic gadgetry and appliances in homes.

“You can take smaller storage units (about the size of a large chest freezer) put them in locations at end of line so they feed back into network at peak times,” he says. “It means you can levellise the load without having to invest millions in network upgrades.”

But Hutchings says that while there is a clear economic case to avoid network upgrades, the company is hopeful that it can eventually bring down costs far enough to make it attractive to households. Those cost reductions, however, are only likely to emerge in large-scale production.

Hutchings says energy storage is a growth industry, driven by the increases in peak demand as retailers sell more and more energy hungry appliances, the introduction of smart grids, and the proliferation of solar panels. He sees it growing to a multi-billion dollar market over the next decade, although this will largely depend on costs.

Bloomberg has a report on the ambitions of one time Australian tidal power company Atlantis - Morgan Stanley-Backed Atlantis Targets India, China for Tidal Power Plants.

Atlantis Resources Corp., an ocean- current turbine maker backed by Morgan Stanley, plans to expand in China, India and South Korea after winning a bid in the U.K. to build the world’s largest tidal-power project.

Atlantis Resources may start building a 50 megawatt tidal farm by 2012 in Gujarat, a western Indian state, and conduct commercial-scale trials in South Korea, Timothy Cornelius, the chief executive officer, said an interview today.

“China’s the next big market for tidal energy,” Cornelius, 34, said in Singapore at the Clean Energy conference. “It has the most natural tidal resources in the world and can be home to more than 1,000 megawatts of tidal energy.”

Global production of electricity harnessing the ocean waves may climb ten-fold to as much as 300 megawatts in the next couple of years, said Cornelius, a former submersible engineer who splits his time between Singapore and London. The potential to produce marine power economically is about 24,000 megawatts, he said. It costs 2.5 million pounds ($4.01 million) per megawatt for a minimum 200 megawatt-tidal project, he said.

Energy Bulletin has a transcript of a speech by James Schlesinger at the recent ASPO USA conference - The peak oil debate is over.

May I start with a bromide: a resource which is finite is not inexhaustible. If you think that over, it should not be a revelation. That was a bromide… some people think a keynote should never rise above a bromide….

Some five years ago in Italy I concluded a talk by saying that like the inhabitants of Pompeii, who ignored the neighboring volcano, Vesuvius, until it detonated, the world ignores the possibility of peak oil at its peril.

Two years ago in addressing ASPO in Cork, Ireland, I argued that the peakists had won the intellectual argument, except for some minor details about precise timing, but that by and large everyone recognized that there were limits on our capacity to increase the production of crude oil as we have steadily since World War Two.

[I also argued] that peakists were no longer a beleaguered minority, that they had won, and that consequently they should be gracious in victory.

There’s an old spiritual that is relevant here. The walls of those who doubted the peak seemed to be impregnable. Nonetheless, you marched around the walls seven times and then blew the trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

But acceptance by knowledgeable people is not enough. The political order should respond. Nonetheless, our willingness, let alone our ability, to do anything serious about the impending inability to increase oil output is still a long way off.

The political order responds to what the public believes today, not to what it may come to believe tomorrow. It is also resistant to any action that inflicts pain or sacrifice on those who vote. The payoff in politics comes from reassurance, perhaps precluded by a rhetorical challenge.

Still, the challenge is clear in both logic and in the evidence. Let me start briefly with the logic,

If something cannot be sustained, it will eventually not be sustained… ultimately it will shrink.

Secondly, you cannot produce oil unless you first discover it (a contribution by Colin Campbell).

Third, a resource that is finite cannot continually have its production increased.

What is the evidence?

First, we remain heavily dependent on super-giant and giant oilfields discovered in the 50s and 60s of the last century… I might add, of the last millennium. Only rarely in recent decades have discoveries equaled production. Mostly, it’s been one barrel discovered for every three barrels produced.

Second, old super-giants like Burgan in Kuwait and [Cantarell] in Mexico have gone into decline earlier than had been anticipated… and going into decline have been Alaska, the North Sea, western Siberia and the like.

Third, while it is not yet “Twilight in the Desert” (as you may have read) still we are well into the afternoon, even in Saudi Arabia. Even the Ghawar oilfield is increasingly hard to sustain.

Fourth, in 2004 we experienced our first demand-driven price spike, as opposed to the previous price spikes driven by supply interruptions. We still operate at about the level of production capacity of 2004.

Next, given projected decline curves running from 4 to 6 percent, and the projected increase in demand during the next quarter century, we shall require the new capacity equivalence of five Saudi Arabias.

Even the International Energy Agency, which previously had been sanguine, now suggests that we can no longer increase production of conventional oil in the course of this decade.

Note that it is conventional oil: that is all that Hubbert talked about. Somewhat disingenuously, the debate has been turned on him by talking about fuel liquids in general, throwing in tar sands, heavy oil, coal liquids, oil shale and so on.

But clearly, large conventional oil production is increasingly no longer part of the future unless there is a technological breakthrough, which Mr. Gilbert talked about just a few moments ago, raising the ultimate recovery rate from existing fields, which at this moment we cannot expect.

Of course, there are uncertainties which make timing predictions with regard to the peak risky. Iraq, which has been held back for a variety of reasons, may come along as one of those five new needed Saudi Arabias.

Offshore Brazil and offshore oil elsewhere are promising. Shale gas, which is apparently coming in abundance (but is not, of course, oil) may somewhat alleviate the pressures on liquid fuels.

But in general we must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source in expanding the world’s economy for more than half a century.

Can the political order face up to the challenge? There is no reason for optimism.

We are likely to see pseudo-solutions, misleading alternatives and sheer sloganeering: “energy independence,” “getting off foreign oil” and the like. All of that sheer sloganeering we have seen to this point.

The political order (which abhors political risk) tends to rely on the Biblical prescription, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Biodiesel Magazine has an article on Aurora Algae's plan to build an algae based products plant in Australia (with biodiesel seeming to be a low priority) - Aurora Algae unveils new business plan.

Aurora Algae Inc. is in the process of constructing a demonstration-scale facility in northwestern Australia, which is expected to be operational by the end of the year. Plans for an adjacent commercial-scale plant are also underway.

The company, formally known as Aurora Biofuels Inc., recently changed its name to reflect a new focus. According to Aurora CEO Greg Bafalis, the original focus of the business was on biofuels development, but with the name change Aurora has shifted its focus to algae production. “When I joined the company it was really apparent to me that the platform is algae—and what you can make from that algae,” he said. “So, we’ve transitioned into what I call higher value products, such as omega-3 EPA. Moving towards those higher-value products allows us, with our current yields and current cost structure, to actually go out and build a commercial facility in a profitable manner.”

While Aurora plans to initially focus on the production of high-value algae-based products, the company hasn’t abandoned the idea of biofuels production. “We haven’t completely dropped biodiesel production,” Bafalis said. “I would say instead of being the primary product, it’s more of a byproduct in our process.” Ramping up and optimizing a new technology is always an expensive and time consuming process, he continued. “By going towards higher-value products, it gives us the time to go out on a very large commercial scale and prove out our system, grow our algae, and find the optimizations we need to get the costs in line to produce a product like biodiesel,” Bafalis said. “We think the evolution will be there, and down the line—whether its five years or 10 years—maybe the costs will come into line, and at that point we’ll not only to serve the attractive markets that we are going after in nutriceuticals, but also evolve back into the fuel markets.”

Work on Aurora’s demonstration-scale facility is nearly complete. “Over the past 10 months, we have been developing and constructing a demonstration facility in northwestern Australia,” Bafalis said. “We currently have 38 micro-ponds, which are basically two square-meter ponds. We’ve been growing algae in those ponds for the past few months and gathering a lot of very important data. We are also in the middle of constructing six one-acre raceway ponds, which will come into operation at the end of the year.”

The Business Spectator has a post on some of the challenges facing the smart grid industry - Smart-grid players don't look so smart.

Smart grids and smart meters are starting to make their presence felt, but at the Gridwise conference in Washington last month it was clear the companies promoting them have plenty of work left to do to explain to customers exactly what they're for.

There were many positive reports and discussions from the assembled smart-grid industry members – much talk about the enormous progress that has been made.

However several government speakers – at the highest level – also expressed concern about the way the industry is handling its business. And, of course, the lack of customer engagement and the subsequent court actions and other customer problems were never far down the agenda.

While the industry has definitely lifted its game on the consumer issues, concerns were expressed that there was no unified message from it about what smart grids and smart meters are all about. Each power company sends out its own messages to its customers, and the communication that does take place is half-hearted – the utilities are not used to explaining to their customers what they are doing and, because the smart meter issue in particular has questionable benefits to users, customers feel that the utilities are continuing to play some games.

On the other hand, utilities still believe, to a large extent, that customers should simply trust them.

Another issue that was mentioned was that there is no third-party marketplace where consumers themselves can buy and install standardised power monitoring and control equipment. This makes the uptake of such equipment rather low, as customers remain confused as to what they should buy.

Also the point was made that the utilities’ equipment business is not transparent. It was claimed that it involves cartel-like structures between the power companies, their own vendors and other parties who are captive to those companies and vendors.

This is also contributing to the power companies’ reluctance to open discussions on these issues with the broader industry.

The electricity industry has to cooperate with the IT industry, the telcos, management companies, renewable industry companies, car manufacturers and many others – and only collectively will it be possible to find the right solutions. It is essential to break through these silos but there is often significant reluctance to do so, despite the lip service that is often paid to it in public.

The Australian has an update on BG's coal seam gas LNG project in Queensland - BG's $15bn Gladstone project starts coal seam gas race.

BRITISH gas giant BG Group has taken the lead in the race to establish the world's first coal seam gas to LNG project.

This follows it signing-off yesterday on its $US15 billion ($15.24bn) Queensland project.

BG Group's Australian subsidiary, QGC, announced it was pushing ahead with the first phase of its Curtis LNG project, which includes the development of a two-train liquefaction plant on Curtis Island near Gladstone, together with the associated upstream and pipeline facilities.

QGC managing director Catherine Tanna, who announced the go-ahead in Brisbane yesterday with Treasurer Wayne Swan and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, said it was BG's single biggest investment.

"Over the next four years, we will build the world's first liquefied natural gas plant to use coal seam gas (CSG) as a feedstock," she said. ...

The Queensland Curtis LNG Project involves building a liquefied natural gas plant at Gladstone, a 540km underground pipeline network, and expanding production in gasfields in the Surat Basin around Chinchilla. It will have an operating life of at least 20 years, with 2014 targeted for first LNG shipments from Gladstone.

BG Group has already signed binding commitments with LNG customers in China, Japan, Singapore and Chile, and said it would continue to provide gas to markets in eastern Australia.

In March, the gas giant signed a $60bn deal with China National Offshore Oil Corp for the supply of 3.6 million tonnes of LNG per annum for 20 years. This was followed by a $20bn agreement with Tokyo Gas for 1.2 million tonnes per annum over 20 years.

Deutsche Bank analyst John Hirjee said BG had always been regarded as the leader in the CSG to LNG space. "It is significant, as it is the first coal seam gas to LNG project anywhere in the world," he said.

As recently as last week, rival CSG project proponent Santos reaffirmed it was planning to announce shortly the final go-ahead for its $15bn-plus facility at Curtis Island, and Origin Energy is expected to have approval for its $35bn facility by the end of the year. Santos still needs to finalise financing and development costs and complete a sales deal with Korea Gas, which awaits Korean government approval.

CleanTechnica has a post on a new technique for building roads without using bitumen - Bacteria Can Build Better Roads for Our Peak Oil Years.

Local jurisdictions in Red state America, increasingly unable to agree to taxes to jointly afford repaving at peak oil prices are simply letting roads decline – in the same way as after the fall of the Roman Empire, in the dark ages there, many roads in Europe returned to mud tracks.

But an innovative new oil-free way of surfacing roads could be on the way to save us from peak oil. This “sandstone” road surface is built by bacteria just using sand, so it’s cheaper. The idea from Thomas Kosbau + Andrew Wetzler is the winning entry in the Korean green design iida awards, announced by designboom.

The idea is to use an abundant resource – sand – and to mix the sand with a solution containing the microbe Bacillus Pasteurii, which cements the sand into a biologically engineered hardened sandstone. Then the sand-and-microbe solution is sprayed onto a layer of sand underneath and hardens the whole thing into a tough road surface made of bio-sandstone.

Currently roads are built of asphalt – a toxic material made of crude oil, that creates heat islands and is subject to peak oil. The advantages of replacing asphalt are both financial and environmental.

It takes 320 barrels of oil to build one kilometer of asphalt roadway. Made from crude oil, asphalt had a price rise of 222% between 2003 and 2008, which is symptomatic of peak oil and likely to keep happening as we use up the remainder of a finite resource.

Asphalt off-gasses, especially in hot weather, and is carcinogenic, causes birth defects, and is harmful to skin and the immune system. Asphalt roads contribute to the heat island effect, reaching temperatures of up to 150 degrees, transferring the heat to air.

If their “sandstone” is strong, durable and long-lasting enough, this bio-engineered road would appear to be brilliant solution. Not only does it take less energy to light a light-colored road surface at night, but the reduction in the heat island effect alone could reduce city temperatures up to 3 degrees C, further lowering city needs for air conditioning, which in turn further reduces CO2 emissions.

The SMH has an update on investigations into high speed rail in Australia - Study will examine cost of fast rail.

THE impact of a high-speed rail line on Sydney Airport's capacity will be considered soon by a government feasibility study.

The study's terms of reference, released yesterday, will see the federal transport department put a cost on a Sydney-to-Newcastle line, but also consider options for high-speed rail links north to Brisbane, and south to Canberra and Melbourne.

The Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, said fast rail could potentially offer a significant cut to commuting times for people travelling between Sydney, Newcastle and Gosford.

The $20 million study aims to answer the question of whether a fast train is economically viable, given Australia's large distances and small population compared with European and Asian countries which are increasingly embracing high-speed rail.

A route, station options and high-level costing will be identified by next July.

More detailed studies of public and private financing options, patronage forecasts, and the implications for airline traffic will be considered in a second phase, and a report to the government will be completed by mid-2012.

A formal reference group will include representatives from state governments.

Earlier advice to the department had suggested high-speed rail was not viable in Australia. A spokesman for Mr Albanese said yesterday previous studies had not put a real cost on building a network.

If high-speed rail was found to be uneconomical now, the study would look at when it might become financially viable, he said.

The Japanese did it first with the bullet train in 1964. Saudi Arabia is spending $15 billion expanding its high-speed rail network, and close behind are Qatar and Kuwait, which are spending $10 billion each. Europeans have an enviable high-speed connection; it was Spain's network that captured the attention of the US president.

When told more people used fast trains between Seville and Madrid than those driving and flying put together, Barack Obama announced high-speed rail would be a key part of his $US8 billion fiscal Recovery Act.

"Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system - and everybody stands to benefit," he said.

Perhaps most impressive of all are the Chinese. In the previous five years they spent more on rail, roads and other fixed assets than they spent in the past 50. Next China plans to link 20,000 kilometres with high-speed rail networks before 2015.

Australian commuters, meanwhile, are left behind, frustrated on overcrowded city platforms or choking to death in peak-hour meltdown because we still don't have high-speed rail as a transport alternative.

Of course we should. It's madness that on a car journey from Wollongong to Newcastle, drivers grind to a halt because of traffic in Wahroonga. This otherwise beautiful suburb has become an inescapable quagmire. No one contemplates taking the trip by train simply because without fast rail it isn't viable.

Transport Minister Anthony Albanese has finally announced a study will begin into high-speed rail, but let's not get excited. If his pre-election announcement was anything to go by, we will not see the report's findings until just days before the 2013 election.

Todd Woody has an interview at Yale Environment 360 with the CEO of solar thermal power company Brightsource - In California’s Mojave Desert, Solar-Thermal Projects Take Off.

This week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and other dignitaries gathered in the Mojave Desert to officially break ground on BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to be built in the United States in nearly two decades.

BrightSource is one of a half-dozen big solar farms, with a combined electricity-generating capacity of 2,829 megawatts, licensed by the California Energy Commission over the past two months. By year’s end, California and federal regulators expect to approve additional projects that will produce a total of 4,143 megawatts. At peak output, that’s the equivalent of several nuclear power plants and more than seven times the solar capacity installed in the United States last year.

The approval of the projects comes after years of environmental review and controversies over the installations’ impact on water, wildlife, and fragile desert landscapes. The power plants licensed so far will cover some 39 square miles of desert land with a variety of new and old solar thermal technologies. Unlike rooftop photovoltaic panels that directly convert sunlight into electricity, solar thermal uses the sun to heat liquids to create steam that drives electricity-generating industrial turbines.

BrightSource’s 370-megawatt Ivanpah project, located just over the California border, 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, is the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant project currently under construction. The company, led by CEO John Woolard, received a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the United States Department of Energy to build the project, which will deploy 347,000 large mirrors that will surround three towers on 3,500 acres of federal land. The mirrors will focus the sun on a water-filled boiler that sits atop the tower to create high-temperature, high-pressure steam.

Woolard, 45, came to BrightSource as chief executive in 2004 after co-founding Silicon Energy, an energy efficiency software company, and stints at California utility PG&E, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and VantagePoint Venture Partners, a leading Silicon Valley green tech venture capital firm. ...

e360: BrightSource’s Ivanpah project is not only the first large-scale solar thermal project to break ground, it is the first to deploy a new power tower technology. Why is that significant?

Woolard: Our team was part of building older trough plants and you learn a lot. If you take a power tower, you get higher temperatures and pressures. That gives you higher thermo-to-electrical conversion efficiency. Think of that as more efficiency, less waste, lower cost. Because of that, you need fewer mirrors, less solar field, and you have a more efficient design.

The other gets down to how you actually build on the land. If you take the older trough designs or anything with a lot of mirrors, [it] would degrade the land. It’s more damaging from a soil and runoff perspective.

The big [problem] is water. What is the world going to look like over the next 20, 30, 40 years? Water in the desert is going to become a much more challenging proposition. So we’ve gotten water usage down to a minimum — the lowest of anybody in the world, basically. ...

e360: While regulators have tried to put big solar projects on the fast track, power line projects to connect solar power plants to the grid remain in the slow lane. How big an obstacle will transmission constraints be for the projects already approved, as well as those in the pipeline?

Woolard: For our projects, we have what’s called LGIA — large generator interconnection agreements — that give us transmission to deliver the power into the California grid. For future projects, you get your LGIAs “x” months in advance of your financial close, so we’re working now on what the transmission is for which sites.

It’s about how you move around and adjust, given everything from appropriate environmental concerns to transmission. We can move within the existing [transmission] system, but the existing system is broken and dysfunctional. In the last decade we’ve done 12,000 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines and 668 miles of interstate [electricity] transmission.

A national renewable energy standard [requiring a percentage of electricity to come from green sources] is hollow without the transmission. It’s like engaging in interstate commerce without the highways and rails. To me transmission is the enabler of a free market. It should be the most bipartisan, universally accepted effort we make as a country because it enables people to compete, it enables prices to go down.

Glenn Greenwald has a post at Salon on the propaganda campaign being conducted against Wikileaks and Julian Assange by some of the usual neoconservative suspects like the odious Jonah Goldberg - The wretched mind of the American authoritarian.

Decadent governments often spawn a decadent citizenry. A 22-year-old Nebraska resident was arrested yesterday for waterboarding his girlfriend as she was tied to a couch, because he wanted to know if she was cheating on him with another man; I wonder where he learned that? There are less dramatic though no less nauseating examples of this dynamic. In The Chicago Tribune today, there is an Op-Ed from Jonah Goldberg -- the supreme, living embodiment of a cowardly war cheerleader -- headlined: "Why is Assange still alive?" It begins this way:

I'd like to ask a simple question: Why isn't Julian Assange dead? . . . WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb. . . .

So again, I ask: Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It's a serious question.

He ultimately concludes that "it wouldn't do any good to kill him, given the nature of the Web" -- whatever that means -- and reluctantly acknowledges: "That's fine. And it's the law. I don't expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him." What he wants the Government to do to "stop" Assange is left unsaid -- tough-guy neocons love to beat their chest and demand action without having the courage to specify what they mean -- but his question ("Why isn't Julian Assange dead?") was published in multiple newspapers around the country today.

Christian Whiton, a former Bush State Department official, wasn't as restrained in his Fox News column last week, writing:

Rather, this [the WikiLeaks disclosure] is an act of political warfare against the United States. . . . .Here are some of the things the U.S. could do: . . .Explore opportunities for the president to designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.

I emailed Whiton and told him I'd like to do a podcast interview with him for Salon about his WikiLeaks proposal and he replied: "Thank you for the invitation, but I am starting a trip tomorrow and will be on a plane just about all day." I replied that it didn't have to be the next day -- I'd be happy to do it any day that was convenient for him -- and he then stopped answering. As I said, the real objective is for them to beat their chest in public and show everyone how tough they are -- take 'em out, Whiton roared -- but they then scamper away when called upon to be specific about what they mean or to defend it (let alone to participate in the violence they relentlessly urge). Whiton was just echoing his fellow war cheerleader, torture advocate Marc Thiessen, who wrote this in The Washington Post, under the headline "WikiLeaks Must be Stopped"

The government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.

"Military assets": apparently, according to this brave and battle-tested warrior -- Marc Thiessen -- the U.S. can and should just send a drone over London or Stockholm and eradicate Assange, or just send some ground troops into Western Europe to abduct him.

Speaking of war cheerleaders, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg today points to an Editorial by The New York Sun's Seth Lipsky which fantasizes -- as Goldberg puts it -- that "Lincoln, and FDR as well, would have pretty much tried to hang the Wikileaks founder for treason." Apparently, the fact that Assange is not and never was an American citizen is no bar to hanging him for "treason": when you wallow in self-centered, self-absorbed imperial exceptionalism, everyone on the planet has the overarching duty of loyalty to your own government, and you think everyone is under the auspices of American rule.

There are multiple common threads here: the cavalier call for people's deaths, the demand for ultimate punishments without a shred of due process, the belief that the U.S. is entitled to do whatever it wants anywhere in the world without the slightest constraints, a wholesale rejection of basic Western liberties such as due process and a free press, the desire for the President to act as unconstrained monarch, and a bloodthirsty frenzy that has led all of them to cheerlead for brutal, criminal wars of aggression for a full decade without getting anywhere near the violence they cheer on, etc. But that's to be expected. We lived for eight years under a President who essentially asserted all of those powers and more, and now have a one who has embraced most of them and added some new ones, including the right to order even American citizens, far from any battlefield, assassinated without a shred of due process. Given that, it would be irrational to expect a citizenry other than the one that is being molded with this mentality.