SMH - WA government to prosecute Apache Energy

The West Australian government will prosecute oil and gas producer Apache Energy for failing to maintain and repair a gas pipeline that exploded last year. The blast in June last year at Apache's Varanus Island gas plant, off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, cut the state's gas supply by one-third. WA Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore on Thursday announced the government had started proceedings to prosecute Apache Energy's wholly owned subsidiary Apache Northwest and its co-licensees in relation to the Varanus Island incident.

Peak Energy - GM's CDO shockwave

Alan Kohler has an update on progress on the great CDO / CDS sting (see here and here for previous installments), now closer to reality after the bankruptcy of GM - GM's CDO shockwave. ...

The GM event has also set Crikey's Guy Rundle to musing about the pros and cons of European style social democracy versus American style capitalism - RIP Detroit, as the US goes socialist.

Reuters - ConocoPhillips sticks to coal-seam LNG timeframe

U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips (COP.N) and Australian partner Origin Energy (ORG.AX) are sticking with their 2014 production start-up date for a $24.5 billion gas-export project in Australia, despite uncertainty over future demand, a ConocoPhillips executive said on Monday.

Ryan Lance, ConocoPhillips head of exploration and production for Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, downplayed speculation the four-train facility in Queensland state, each to produce 3.5 million tonnes a year, would be vulnerable to delays because of weak energy prices and rising costs. The project will rely on coal-seam gas.

Crikey - GFC killed the ETS and Wong won’t negotiate

We will be holding talks; we will continue to have discussions,” Wong said yesterday morning, sounding like she was prepared to keep the pizza and black coffee rolling until a deal was hammered out. But she had already tipped her hand about the nature of the “negotiations”. “We look forward to talking with the crossbenchers about why we think this scheme which has been worked out with environment groups and the business community is the right scheme for Australia,” she said.

According to sources close to the discussions, that pretty much sums up Wong’s attempts to “negotiate”  — explaining why she thinks the Government’s model is a good one and suggesting they support it. She continues to refuse to discuss amendments to the scheme of any kind.

There’s speculation Wong might offer the Greens a higher Renewable Energy Target as a trade-off for support, but a higher RET won’t help reduce emissions when there’s no cap on the growth of emissions-intensive industries, particularly when the RET itself is to be loaded with the same kind of exemptions for big polluters as the CPRS (incomprehensibly, Barnaby Joyce was trying to get Resources bureaucrats appearing at Estimates to agree with his claim that big polluters would be harmed by the RET, despite being 90% exempt from it). In any event, Labor backbenchers from heavy industry electorates have already made clear their concerns about the RET in its current weakened state.

The Australian - Oceanlinx seeks funds

ENEWABLE energy company Oceanlinx expects to finalise a new round of funding in the next few weeks as it looks to install a demonstration-sized unit of the latest model of its wave energy converters at its Port Kembla facility in coming months.

New CEO Ali Baghaei says design improvements mean the Mark III model will be able to capture several times as much energy as the first unit, originally deployed in 2005, and will have a capacity in excess of 2.5Mw, making it the largest of any ocean energy unit being developed in Australia.

The Australian - Pacific Hydro closes Chile deal

AUSTRALIAN renewable energy group Pacific Hydro has closed its largest financing deal, a $US450 million ($560 million) hydro project in Chile that it is developing in conjunction with Italian group Astaldi.

The Chacayes project takes Pacific Hydro's total investment in Chile to more than $1.5 billion in the past four years, when the winding down of the Howard government's renewable energy target forced it to look for opportunities overseas.

The Australian - Greenearth tracks geothermal resource

ASPIRING geothermal group Greenearth Energy says its modelling shows there is potentially a geothermal resource lying under the two Loy Yang brown coal power stations in the Latrobe Valley that could generate electricity and industrial heat to other large businesses in the region.

Greenearth CEO Mark Miller says elevated heat flows and subsequent temperature suggest a geothermal resource of about 150C 2.9km beneath the two power stations.