Energy

Source: Planet Ark

Mozambique has approved the construction of a $2 billion hydro-electric dam in a bid to increase power generation and attract foreign investments, the state-run Noticias daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The paper quoted Energy Minister Salvador Namburete as saying the new Mphanda Nkuwa dam would be built 60 kilometers downstream from the Cahora Bassa Hydro-electric dam (HCB) on the Zambezi River and would produce 1,500 megawatts of power.

Namburete said ownership of the dam would be split 20 percent by state-run Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) and 80 percent by a 50-50 joint venture by local company Energia Capital and Brazil's Camargo Correia.

"It's an infrastructure that will bring quality investments that will contribute to industrialization and the economic and social development of the country," Namburete said.

Four turbines each with a capacity of 375 MW would be built in phase one of the project, expected to start in 2011, he said.

Source: Global Research

Few people in the world know more about oil drilling disasters than Dr. Robert Bea.

Bea teaches engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and has 55 years of experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of engineered systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. Bea has worked for many years in governmental and quasi-governmental roles, and has been a high-level governmental adviser concerning disasters. He worked for 16 years as a top mechanical engineer and manager for Shell Oil, and has worked with Bechtel and the Army Corps of Engineers. One of the world's top experts in offshore drilling problems, Bea is a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, and has been interviewed by news media around the world concerning the BP oil disaster.
Washington's Blog spoke with Dr. Bea yesterday.

WB: Is BP sharing information with the government?

Bea: No. BP is using a "cloak of silence". BP is not voluntarily sharing information or documents with the government.

In May, for example, Senator Boxer subpoenaed information from BP regarding footage of the seafloor taken before the blowout by BP's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). We still have not received a response 12 weeks later.

[Bea subsequently clarified that he's not sure whether BP has failed to release the information, or Senator Boxer's committee has sat on the information. My bet is on BP. Indeed, BP has refused to answer some very basic written questions from Congressman Markey, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. See this and this. Indeed, it is unclear whether BP is sharing vital details even with Thad Allen, Secretary of energy Chu, or the Unified Command].

WB: Might there be problems with the relief wells? I know that it took a couple of relief wells to finally stop the Ixtoc leak, and it has taken as many as 5 relief wells to stop some blowouts.

Bea: Yes, it could take repeated attempts.

WB: Are there any conditions at BP's well which might make killing the leak with relief wells more difficult than with the average deepwater oil spill?

Bea: That's an interesting question. You have to ask why did this location blow out when nearby wells drilled in even deeper water didn't blow out.

You have to look at the geology of the Macondo well. It is in a subsalt location, in a Sigsbee salt formation.

The geology is fractured.

Usually, the deeper you drill, the more pressure it takes to fracture rock. This is called the "fracture gradient".

But when BP was drilling this well, the fracture gradient reversed. Indeed, BP lost all pressure as it drilled into the formation.

WB: Is it possible that this fractured, subsea salt geology will make it difficult to permanently kill the oil leak using relief wells?

Bea: Yes, it could. The Santa Barbara channel seeps are still leaking, decades after the oil well was supposedly capped. This well could keep leaking for years.

Scripps mapped out seafloor seeps in the area of the well prior to the blowout. Some of the natural seeps penetrate 10,000 to 15,000 feet beneath the seafloor. The oil will follow lines of weakness in the geology. The leak can travel several horizontal miles from the location of the leak.

[In other words, the geology beneath the seafloor is so fractured, with soft and unstable salt formations, that we may never be able to fully kill the well even with relief wells. Instead, the loss of containment of the oil reservoir caused by the drilling accident could cause oil to leak out through seeps for years to come.

WB: I know that you've previously said that you're concerned that there might be damage to the well bore, which could make it more difficult for the relief wells to succeed.

Bea: Yes, that's still a concern.

WB: I have heard that BP is underestimating the size of the oil reservoir (and see this). Is it possible that the reservoir is bigger than BP is estimating, and so - if not completely killed - the leak could therefore go on for longer than most assume?

Bea: That's plausible.

WB: The chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon said that the Macondo well was originally drilled in another location, but that "going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools", and that BP abandoned that well. You've spoken to that technician and looked into the incident, and concluded that “they damn near blew up the rig.”.

Do you know where that abandoned well location is, and do you know if that well is still leaking?

Bea: The abandoned well is very close to the current well location. BP had to file reports showing the location of the abandoned well and the new well [with the Minerals Management Service], so the location of the abandoned well is known.

We don't know if the abandoned well is leaking.

WB: Matthew Simmons talked about a second leaking well. There are rumors on the Internet that the original well is still leaking. Do you have any information that can either disprove or confirm that allegation?

Bea: There are two uncorroborated reports. One is that there is a leak 400 feet West of the present well's surface location. There is another report that there is a leak several miles to the West.

[Bea does not know whether either report is true at this time, because BP is not sharing information with the government, let alone the public.]

WB: There are rumors on the Internet of huge pockets of methane gas under the well which could explode. I've looked into this rumor, and have come to the conclusion that - while the leak is releasing tremendous amounts of methane - there are no "pockets" of methane gas which could cause explosions. Do you have any information on this?

Bea: I have looked into this and discussed methane with people who know a tremendous amount about it. There is alot of liquid and solid methane at the Macondo site, but no pockets of methane gas.

WB: That's good news, indeed.

Bea: But there was one deepwater leak I worked with where tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfite were released. We had to evacuate two towns because of the risk. [I didn't ask Dr. Bea if there were any dangerous compounds which could be formed from the interaction of the crude oil and methane with chemicals in the ocean water or dispersants].

And with the Bay Charman oil leak, more than 50% of the oil stayed below the surface of the ocean. [As I've previously pointed out, the US Minerals Management Service and a consortium of oil companies, including BP, found that as little as 2% of the oil which spill from deepwater wells ever makes it to the surface of the ocean. And the use of dispersant might decrease that number still further].

WB: I have previously argued that nuking the well would be a bad idea. What do you think?

Bea: [Bea agreed that nuking the well would be counter-productive. He told me a story about a leaking deepwater well that he was involved in killing. A nuclear package was on its way to the well site but - fortunately - the well stopped by itself before a nuke was deployed. I'm not sure whether this is classified information, so I won't disclose the name of the well. Bea also discussed alternatives in the form of high-pressure, high-temperature conventional explosives, echoing what Bill Clinton said recently].

WB: Thank you for your generous time and for sharing your expertise with us, Dr. Bea.

Bea: You're welcome.

Source: News Max

News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran's Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively "immune" to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton.

Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, "it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared in March that Russia would start the Bushehr reactor this summer. But the announcement from a spokesman for Russia's state atomic agency to Reuters Friday sent international diplomats scrambling to head off a crisis.

The story immediately became front-page news in Israel, which has laid precise plans to carry out an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities while going along with President Obama's plans to use international sanctions and diplomatic persuasion to convince Iran's clerics not to go nuclear.

Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.

"If they're going to do it that's the window that they have," Bolton declared. "Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you're going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.

"So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it's been fueled."

Bolton cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor outside Baghdad and the September 2007 Israeli attack on a North Korean reactor being built in Syria. Both of those strikes came before fuel rods were loaded into those reactors.

"So if it's going to happen in Bushehr it has to happen before the fuel rods go in," Bolton said.

The conversation that touched off the de facto deadline for Israeli military action was a telephone conversation with wire services involving Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian Energy State Nuclear Corp.

Novikov said: "The fuel will be loaded on Aug 21. This is the start of the physical launch” of the reactor.

"From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation," Novikov said, adding that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, will visit Bushehr Aug. 21 to conduct a ceremony for the event.
According to Bolton, once the reactor is operational, it is only a matter of time before it begins producing plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

"And in the normal operation of this reactor, in just a fairly short period of time, you could get substantial amounts of plutonium to use as nuclear weapons," Bolton told Fox.

Russia, which is operating under a $1 billion contract with Iran, has spent more than a decade building the reactor. If Russia moves forward with its plan to fuel the reactor, it could be seen as a major setback to the Obama administration's strategy of engaging Russian leaders in order to win their cooperation.

"The U.S. urged them not to send the Iranian's fuel rods," Bolton said. "They did that. The Obama administration has urged them not to insert the fuel rods in the reactors, but as they've just announced that will begin next week. What that does over time is help Iran get another route to nuclear weapons through the plutonium they could reprocess out of the spent fuel rods."

The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next 8 days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons.

Russian leaders have said the Bushehr reactor project is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog group. According to Iran's ISNA news agency, IAEA inspectors will be on hand to observe the fuel-rod loading process that is now scheduled to begin Aug. 21.

According to Russian officials, Iran has promised in writing to send all spent fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, to ensure they cannot be used for nuclear weapons.

Bolton said the reactor has been "a hole" in American foreign policy for over a decade.

The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration "under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

"I don't think Iran is entitled to that, or I don't think we ought to allow it to happen, because they're manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it," Bolton said.

Russia’s move would put Iran "in a much better position overall," he said, adding, "I think this is a very delicate point, as I say, it closes off to the Israelis one possible target for pre-emptive military action.

Source: oilprice.com

If you think that the upcoming energy shortage is going to be bad, it will pale in comparison to the next water crisis....

One theory about the endless wars in the Middle East since 1918 is that they have really been over water rights. Although Earth is often referred to as the water planet, only 2.5% is fresh, and three quarters of that is locked up in ice at the North and South poles.

In places like China, with a quarter of the world’s population, up to 90% of the fresh water is already polluted, some irretrievably so.

Some 18% of the world population lacks access to potable water, and demand is expected to rise by 40% in the next 20 years.

Aquifers in the US, which took nature millennia to create, are approaching exhaustion. While membrane osmosis technologies exist to convert sea water into fresh, they use ten times more energy than current treatment processes, a real problem if you don’t have any, and will easily double the end cost to consumers.

While it may take 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, it takes a staggering 2,416 gallons of water to do the same.

The author of the piece below seems to walk a tight rope of contradiction, while to their benefit they provide some meaningful perspectives, they fail miserably in connecting their own dots, whether by the action of intellectual blindness, or of ideological complicity. If one looks clearly at the 'life sciences' companies such as Dupont and Monsanto, the outlines of an industry wide attempt to commandeer the profits of the entire planets agricultural output is not difficult to see. The thing is, it takes a leap into the realm of the distastefully sinister to even entertain such a thought, a leap that the intellectually branded academic crowd cannot bring themselves to make, for various reasons.

When taken in context, as a whole, organs such as the Rockefeller Foundation reveal themselves as complex instruments of social engineering - Norman Dodd, the head researcher for the Reece Committee, uncovered the fact of educational subversion in the United States a half century ago, where his investigations proved without a doubt that tax exempt foundations were intentionally manipulating mass perception through the apparatus of state education. It is these same organs that have made it their goal to alienate societies from their agricultural roots, upending cultures and erecting a cosmopolitan/industrial worldview.

The 'quick fix' called the Green Revolution was little more than a hugely successful attempt at the dissemination of global food dependency, wherein the dependents would be completely and utterly reliant on the chemical companies for their fundamental nourishment. The quick fix was more like an anesthetic, injected to discourage the development of a more sustainable food cropping system when it would have best served humanity, just in time. The 70's came and went however, and the rest is history, we now sit atop a population of six plus billion, a dwindling oil supply, eroded top soils, and depleted aquifers.


Source: Counter Currents

Assigned during World War II to Dupont, where he helped to develop DDT as part of the war effort, Borlaug was offered the sky, but given the choice between Dupont and sub-subsistence science for sub-subsistence Mexican farmers, he chose the latter, working with the Rockefeller Foundation, in a project to stave off a looming food crisis in overpopulated Mexico.

The project goal was to breed strains of wheat that could withstand adverse climates, survive wheat's fungal diseases, and produce prodigiously on dwarf plants, then convince tradition-bound farmers to adopt forthwith the new hybrids and the technology that accompanied them. It was a race against time, and an extraordinarily demanding task in the pre-DNA era. Borlaug set up field operations in two locations with disparate climates and growing seasons so he could have plants accustomed to multiple climates, and could grow two generations of seedlings each year.

Borlaug shortly achieved his goal, and Mexico's food crisis was over in a decade. On to Asia, where the same thing was happening: overpopulation. India was home to some of the poorest people in the world. Famine was widely forecast for the mid-seventies. It was the era of Ehrlich's Population Bomb. Stanford professor Ehrlich was an icon for the rising environmental movement, but overnight, stubborn farm boy Borlaug appeared to prove him wrong. In a few short years, the Green Revolution turned a land of undernourished millions into the second largest wheat producer in the world. Borlaug became the hero of millions of peasants, and also of those who spoke for unlimited growth, and in the next twenty years The Population Bomb disappeared from the environmentalist lexicon, leaving the population boom unquestioned.

The Green Revolution, which was to go on producing wonder strains for other crops and other countries, had three central parts. The other two were irrigation and chemical fertilizer. These changed agriculture fundamentally, from a primarily solar-energy craft dependent upon local weather and soil conditions, to a fossil-fuel technology designed to force the land to produce mightily regardless of its natural limitations. Borlaug, summarizing in his Nobel lecture, warned that the new hybrids had not resulted in major yield improvements without both irrigation and "a strong responsiveness and high efficiency in the use of heavy doses of fertilizers. "Plentiful water, plentiful chemical fertilizer - that's the secret to how in the last half century India - and California - turned arid lands almost instantly into wildly productive garden baskets. It may not be a sustainable solution, but at the time, the world needed a quick fix."

In his Nobel lecture, Borlaug talked proudly about how the new practices had given near-starving subsistence farmers surpluses they could sell, the money to buy oil-driven water pumps and tractors, and the influence to insist upon doors opening to the broader world. If you'll permit me a broad brush, the Green Revolution had doubled and tripled grain production for multi-millions who had been on the brink of starvation, but turned locally self-sustaining agriculture into hydroponics. And it turned subsistence farmers, dependent on the whims of the soil, sun and rain, into small-time contractors dependent on the whims of the discount rate, the commodities markets and the petrochemical industry.

It weakened their umbilical cord to Mother Earth, and eased a process in which millions would find themselves drawn to seek their fortunes in the cities, providing cheap labor to run the Indochinese economic machine. But those were events far in the future when Borlaug performed his magic, and it's hard to quibble when several hundred million people are about to die of starvation.

...

The Green Revolution doubled the world's irrigated acreage from 346 million acres to 690 million acres, and increased by a factor of nearly five its consumption of chemical fertilizer. Where does all the irrigation water come from? Wells, largely; as the World Bank has pointed out, groundwater comprises 97% of the world's accessible freshwater reserves.

Wells are a classic case of Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" - if the aquifer is shared by multiple individuals or multiple villages and there are no rules on how much anyone can use, then the users are individually, although not collectively, better off if they use as much as they want until the wells all run dry. So unless everyone follows the Golden Rule or there is an elaborate legal "groundwater management plan," controlling how much everyone gets, the wells DO run dry.

...

So when the aquifers run dry, a return to the days when agriculture was limited to natural precipitation, is inevitable. This means, on top of the present inability of yield increases to keep up with population increases, a relatively abrupt loss of at least 10% of production.

What about the fertilizer? That comes from mining operations, too. That is literally true of phosphorus, although it wasn't before we came along. There are more phosphorus-rich bones walking the face of the earth than ever before in geological history; humanity is hoofing it around with 5 billion kg or 11 billion pounds of phosphorus, which comes from mines, - NONE of it recycled. This has happened only since half of us moved to the cities, taking our personal wastes with us; petrochemical fertilizers replaced natural ones; and community sewers were invented. Mama Nature can't afford this kind of progress for long.

...

The story of how we got here is complex - a confluence of population boom, oil boom and bust, the tragedy of the commons, misallocation of resources between rich and poor, the almost-deliberate blindness of America to the consequences of biofuel production (almost!) - the list goes on. There is an ongoing academic argument about whether the plight of the poor is one of inequitable distribution "or" population, but it is quite clear at this point that the answer is "Both." There is also a sociological factor - the separation of people from the land, which has allowed us to "commoditize" land, to block the recycling of phosphorus and nitrogen, to separate sustenance from daily life, to warehouse in China's cities the millions who had recently been attached for millenia to the cycles of sun and rain and soil. Out of sight, out of mind. We will not treat the earth sustainably when we do not see it and feel it in our daily lives and know directly that what surrounds us is what keeps us and our descendants alive and healthy.

...

Once again we 6.9 billion people are on our own, without leaders or guidance. But we know what we must do, as individuals and nations: we must avoid gasohol and beef, because we cannot take food from the mouths of the hungry; we must manage and conserve our diminishing water supplies, we must work to eliminate abject poverty so that people can pay for what they eat and we must begin to decrease our numbers by limiting ourselves to one child per family.33 There is no evidence that we can avoid famine otherwise. The Green Revolution was a one shot deal, because we cannot again double irrigated acreage or multipy use of chemical fertilizers by five; and because the Green Revolution was a program of the oil age, which is fast departing. Modest crop-yield increases may keep up with population growth for a while (although they haven't for 25 years), but all indications are that the prices of what food there is will rapidly climb above the budgets of billions of us.

Related Video

Matt Simmons of The Ocean Energy Institute, is a man truly in the wilderness right now, who calling British Petroleum on their deceit, has been pilloried to no end. In the interview below Simmons talks with Jim Puplava of The Financial Sense Newshour about the world's oil production reality and the 'Pearl Harbor' in the Gulf of Mexico.

Source: BBC

A desalination plant which begins operating in Madras on Saturday will provide some of the cheapest drinking water in India, backers say.

They say that the plant will supply 1,000 litres of drinking water for just over $1 and could well be a "template" for other coastal Indian cities.

The company behind the plant says that it is the biggest in South Asia.

It will provide 100 million litres of water a day to the city by filtering sea water under high pressure.

In comparison, the government-run water board supplies about 650 million litres of water to the city's seven million residents.
Competitively priced

"We are using the advanced reverse osmosis technology. We are purifying the water by filtering it under high pressure. Unlike other desalination plants we are not boiling the water and as a result we are saving a lot of energy," Natarajan Ganesan, Joint General Manager of the Chennai Water Desalination company told the BBC.
Flooded street in Calcutta India's monsoon is notoriously erratic

Mr Ganesan said that because the plant used "energy recovering technology", electricity consumption was reduced - making water produced there arguably the most competitively priced in India.

"It can be competitive even when compared to supplying water from natural sources like lakes. One has to spend lot of money on transport water from lakes," he said.

The plant will process 237 million litres of sea water per day.

An initial treatment will remove solids present in the water, before it is passed through a membrane under high pressure.

The plant - which cost $140m - is the joint venture between an Indian company IVRCL and Befessa of Spain. It is built under the "deboot" system - design, build, own, operate and transfer.

The government-run Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB) will buy the purified water for the next 25 years.

"We have agreed to buy the water from them at 48.66 rupees for 1,000 litres - meaning that it costs us just over one dollar for 1,000 litres," CMWSSB Managing Director Shiv Das Meena said.

"The water is purified and demineralised. This takes away salt, lime and other particles. The purified water meets the government standards. It tastes just like ordinary water and above all it is cheap," he said.

Chennai has been suffering from a chronic water shortage for decades. Its water needs are primarily met by lakes situated around the city. But these lakes depend on the erratic north-east monsoon.

On an average year, the monsoon brings about 100cm (39in) of rainfall, but most of this arrives over a short period - resulting in a massive run-off into the sea.