The Bullroarer - Friday 10th April 2009

ABC - First all-electric car approved

The Federal Government has unveiled the first all-electric car that has been certified to run on Australian roads. The plug-in car made by Mitsubushi, called the iMiEV, can travel 160 kilometres on a seven-hour charge and has a top speed of 130 kilometres per hour. The car runs on a bank of lithium ion batteries. The engine uses no petrol and does not produce any greenhouse gas emissions.

Greentech Media - Atlantis Plans 1MW Tidal Power Project off Australian Coast

Fresh on the heels of landing a $14 million investment, Atlantis Resources now has a deal to install a 1-megawatt tidal power turbine off the Australian coast, according to The Australian. Singapore-based Atlantis plans to provide the power to iron ore producer Mount Gibson Iron (no relation to Australia’s most famous Hollywood export) for its operations on Koolan Island in western Australia. Just last month, Atlantis got a $14 million boost from Norwegian renewable energy provider Statkraft, which said it would work with Atlantis to install tidal power devices in Scotland’s Pentland Firth (see Ocean-Power-Meets-Bike-Chain Company Gets $14M).


Larvatus Prodeo - Geothermal energy progresses - slowly

I still happen to think that HFR geothermal energy has a real future here in Australia, and Geodynamics are as likely as anybody to make a go of it, otherwise I’d sell my shares. But what it does show is the gap between rhetoric and reality for the clean energy sector - particularly in terms of its ability, right now, to start replacing large chunks of fossil fuel power - is real, and substantial. I think it’d help discussion greatly if the difference between “sounds good in the press release” and “we’re ready to deploy at bulk scale” was acknowledged more often and applied to all prospective energy generation technologies.

SMH - The reality of electric dreams

Shai Agassi's notion is to wean the world off its oil addiction. The idea is at once simple and staggeringly complicated: replace cars that run on petrol with their equivalents that run on electricity, via a quickly rechargeable, easily replaceable battery. In both execution and practicality, it's a program that owes much to the mobile phone industry, the progress of which showed that batteries could be reduced from the size of a brick to the size of a fingernail without affecting output or endurance.

SMH - The Australian connection

SHAI AGASSI and Evan Thornley met last September, when Thornley, then a novice Victorian state Labor MP and former internet entrepreneur, was visiting the US with his son.

SMH - Origin coal seam gas project likely to create 5000 jobs

IN A change from the gloomy news engulfing the market, Origin Energy has revealed its gas export project with US oil giant ConocoPhillips could be worth $35 billion and may create up to 5000 jobs in a region hit by resources sector sackings.

The joint-venture partners said yesterday their plans to build a liquefied natural gas plant would create up to 4000 jobs in the Queensland resources hub of Gladstone, where Rio Tinto cut 500 staff on Tuesday. Documents lodged with the Queensland Government said the $35 billion will be spent between now and 2020 if the partners build the maximum number of four production units, or trains.

The Australian - BHP Billiton to quit China CSG project

BHP Billiton is withdrawing from its coal seam gas project in China as part of efforts to exit non-core businesses. Development at the coal seam gas project, located in the coal-rich Shanxi province, hasn't been going smoothly, the China Business News reported today

The Australian - Historic accord on coal in Hunter Valley

BOTTLENECKS at the Port of Newcastle that stifled exports during the last resources boom should be cleared by the time the next one rolls around. The 14 Hunter Valley coal exporters who use the port last night signed a landmark agreement on long-term allocation of loading slots that promises to unlock billions of dollars in private investment and triple capacity to 300 million tonnes by 2015.

ABC - $1m to target powerline green projects

More than $1 million will be spent on environmental projects around powerlines in southern Queensland.

WA Today - Who is behind climate change deniers ?

In May this year, the multibillion-dollar oil giant Exxon-Mobil acknowledged that it had been doing something similar. It announced that it would cease funding nine groups that had fuelled a global campaign to deny climate change.

Exxon's decision comes after a shareholder revolt by members of the Rockefeller family and big superannuation funds to get the oil giant to take climate change more seriously. Exxon (once Standard Oil) was founded by the legendary John D. Rockefeller. Last year, the chairman of the US House of Representatives oversight committee on science and technology, Brad Miller, said Exxon's support for sceptics "appears to be an effort to distort public discussion".

The funding of an array of think tanks and institutes that house climate sceptics and deniers also worried Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society. It found that in 2005 Exxon distributed nearly $3 million to 39 groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change". It asked Exxon to stop the funding and its protests helped force Exxon's recent retreat.

SMH - Murray river flows lowest in a century

THE amount of water flowing into the stricken Murray River between January and March was the lowest for that quarter in the 117 years that records have been kept. An unprecedented drought has thrown the river system into decline, according to the guardian for the river. "We've had big droughts before and big floods before, but what we didn't have was climate change," said Rob Freeman, the chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.

A second record has been smashed too - for a three-year period. Water flowing into the system in the three years to March totalled 5160 gigalitres, less than half the previous 11,300 gigalitre minimum during the 1943-46 drought, according to the authority's update.

Peak Energy - Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

TED has a talk from Saul Griffith on his company Makani and their plans to generate large scale wind power using airborne wind turbines - Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind.

Peak Energy - Expanding Geothermal Power In Indonesia

Peak Energy - Solar Power Landfill Cover Goes Live in Texas

Peak Energy - The Great Biodiesel Shutdown

Peak Energy - GE Backs Small Wind Maker Southwest Windpower

Peak Energy - Shippers Taking It Slow in Bad Times

Peak Energy - Chinese car sales surpass US market

Peak Energy - A Cheaper Way to Draw Oil from Shale ?

Peak Energy - Connectivity and Poverty

Peak Energy - UK launches massive program to archive every email

"First all-electric car approved"
The first mass-market BEV to be approved for use in Australia, and its performance is already well in excess of the average need. Obviously, it's not going to be acceptable...

Edit: I hope, I really, really hope, that people take to the BEV in droves. If we feel we have to drive cars, they should be as efficient and non-polluting as possible, and you can't get better than a BEV.
Sure, walking, riding a bike, and taking PT are even better, but I think that's a step too far for most people when petrol is cheap (even if the roads are gridlocked...).

If anyone is interested, I was watching a 7:30 Report from last week, and Kerry 'the Red Terror' O'Brien was interviewing Paul Keating:

KERRY O'BRIEN: So, do you believe that it is one fundamental test for President Obama, that he has to move to at least temporarily nationalise one or more of these big banks that you say are either nearly insolvent or perhaps even insolvent?

PAUL KEATING: Why should we be actually selling toxic assets out of a bank which has had it? You see? So someone's got to go in and put the bullet through them. Now, who's it going to be? I don't know whether Larry or Tim, both whom I know, I don't know whether they're up to it or whether they want to do it. But, you see, the old Clinton gang, they always wanted to get on with the top end of town in Wall Street.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You weren't too bad with the top end of town in Australia.

PAUL KEATING: No, but what I did when the banks were in trouble in '91, you know, I put the screws on the ANZ and Westpac. And they're on their feet today because of that treatment.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Aren't you puzzled that Barack Obama, with all of the things he has promised, has surrounded himself precisely with that same advice? Wasn't that advice that was a part of the problem?

PAUL KEATING: That's the old Democratic Party establishment. "Have we got a Government for you," that's what they've said to him. And he may have said, "Alright, I'll give it a try". But will he keep them?

Emphasis added.

PAUL KEATING: The G7 is a dead show, It finished the day the wall came down and China started to rise to pre-eminence as a big power. The G7, just a European centric show, an Atlantic show, is fundamentally finished.

The water issue in the Murray is really getting serious now. Travelling from the Murray River northward in the last few days, all the padocks have been destocked. No sheep or cattle to be seen for miles. Some of the best hay producing country around Junee is just red dust where normally it would have crop residue. It has rained yesterday and today but they are isolated showers and thunderstorms rather than the soaking rains that used to arrive this time of year lik eclockwork. It is now no longer acceptable to talk about climate change as future event. It's here.

Clear-felling all the trees certainly didn't help.

What? Are you crazy?! It's greenies like you who caused Black Saturday! If only we'd cut EVERYTHING down there'd've been no fires!

Bloody commie.

I also want the Murray to meet the sea, rather than blocking it off and making it into a really, really long lake! Next thing you know, I'll be promoting Stalin's Birthday as a national holiday! :D ;)

You know, the problem with you Red-Greenies...
(Or is that Green-Reddies? Anyway, you and Brown, you know who I mean...)
...is that you never look on the bright side of things. I can easily name at least one good thing to come out of the current situation in the Murray-Darling Basin (well, only one thing, actually, but surely there must be others).

"Pink Salt"!!! Wonderful stuff!

It looks so dinky here in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney - setting off the white tablecloths of all the harbourside nosheries. How can there be anything wrong with the Oz ecosystem when it produces such a useful foodstuff in such a delightful designer shade...
;-)

Yeh,sure,we have a drought in parts of the Murray/Darling Basin.Nothing really unusual in that if you read a bit of history and have some knowledge of the climate regime in Australia.I'm not a climate change denier by any means.But let's get real.

About 150 years of land abuse has landed us in this situation. To wit - Overstocking of cattle,sheep and now goats,feral animals - rabbits,foxes,wild dogs,cats and goats(again),grandiose irrigation schemes far beyond the capacity of the water supply,growing crops which use large quantities of water for minimal returns,indulging in grandiose schemes for population increase - to make all the above problems much,much worse.

Yeh,let's get real and live within our means.

Car makers fear the worst for big Aussie sedans

Metro rail plan hits the bufferOh bloody hell, we don't have time for capital- and energy-intensive projects like a Metro. Just build Light Rail and Trams, ffs!

* The Ministry of Transport warns in December of "potentially competing objectives" between the metro and an upgrade of Victoria Road.

Easyily fixed: Cancel the upgrading of Victoria Road, or cancell both projects. Continuing funding of the expansion of the road network is not a acceptable option.

$1.7 billion Brisbane airport expansion deferred as tourist numbers fall. Deferred. Probably forever.

Spin me a tale, Queensland Rail. The Courier Mails' never-ending and senseless campaign against QR continies...

Alan Jones off air 'indefinitely'

"You can tell those bastards who wish the rumours were right that I'm not dead yet."

Damn. /puts the bubbly back in the cellar

Thanks for the mini-Bullroarer Bellistner.

Though I'm sorry to hear Alan Jones is still with us...