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8 comments on The Bullroarer - Friday 2nd May 2008
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8 comments on The Bullroarer - Friday 2nd May 2008
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theage.com.au - Clean-coal investment adds power to Victoria
Interesting one - thanks for posting that link (BTW - if any of you see any relevant news items feel free to post the to the latest BullRoarer thread - its quite hard trying to scan all the local media, especially when we are trying to write longer pieces as well).
Boof - aren't you near Beaconsfield ?
Does anyone know what magical upgrade process they are using ?
I live in SW not NE Tas. Ferguson was on telly saying this process would lead to brown coal exports. Huh? From a gold mine a few hundred metres from the Tamar River. I think brown coal in Australia is about 70 Mtpa for electricity and some cement manufacture, plus 25-50% extra CO2 compared to black coal.
The other coal story in Tas is that the grid was 30+% coalfired in April via Basslink HVDC due to local drought. The connector being close to Victoria's La Trobe Valley. That figure was 0% in 2005 before the cable. Hydro spent over $100m in April importing that as well as peaking gas from fields such as Basker. The Hydro is going to get into run-of-river mini hydros and also look at offsets. When trees are dying due to drought? They are against a biomass burning generator proposed by a logging firm.
Poppy seed oil is to be made into biodiesel for use in Hobart buses and small islands. Two reasons I suspect are that the Taleban have flooded the market for opiate feedstock and the caterpillars that plague canola will OD on the poppies.
I have a question for Hydro; if they are getting a hot graphite block for King Island does that mean they are unhappy with the vanadium redox batteries? One more question; why not use pumped hydro to smooth windpower? The rain may be less but the wind will still blow under GW, I think.
I thought the Taliban stopped the drug trade (back about 8 years ago or so) - the tinfoil community believes this is one of the reasons the US / UK are staying in Afghanistan forever - to stop them doing it again ! There are some pretty funny stories in the press about this if you keep an eye out for them and are sufficiently cynical (or just read something like Cryptogon and let him do it for you).
I talked about the King Island graphite vs vanadium issue in my post on graphite storage - it wasn't clear exactly what the issue was but some visiting SA parliamentarian noted they were unhappy with the batteries - if you ask them and get a response let me know what the story is.
You know, you could argue that if we (Oz) really wanted to help the Afghanis, we would show them how to make morphine out of them thar poppies. If we really really believed in the free market.
Oh wait, we grown them too...
The Taliban supported the drug trade while fighting the civil war, to get funds to fight, they stopped it while in power (and got a few hundred million from the UN and US to do so), but nowadays since they're rebels again they're buddies with the growers again.
See for example this report about the Taliban protecting growers, or this one noting that Afghanistan now supplies 90% of the world's opium.
Basically it was all predictable. Any insurgency needs money, and so will commit crimes of smuggling of all kinds (drug, arms, any taxed goods like cigarettes) or at least co-operate with and provide protection to criminal groups.
Sure - I don't doubt that Afghanistan is once again the source of most of the world's opium.
And no doubt the insurgents are involved in trafficking it (or extracting protection money from those who do so).
But I gather the warlords who are running the provinces are also heavily involved - and I think they have had their fingers in this pie for a long time.