Melbourne to get first biochar plant

THE country's first commercial biochar plant, to turn green waste into energy and store carbon dioxide, will be built in Melbourne after State Energy Minister Michael O'Brien awarded a $4.5 million grant to Pacific Pyrolysis. PacPyro's "carbon-negative electricity" pilot-scale project will turn two tonnes of municipal organic and wood waste an hour into electricity and biochar and store as much as 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. It will be built over the next 12-18 months at one of the existing suburban waste facilities operated by partner Transpacific Industries, which will provide the feedstock. PacPyro's chief technology officer Adriana Downie said the $10 million project would be the first in Australia to make marketable quantities of biochar, which would be sold as a soil enhancer for a few hundred dollars a tonne, a price comparable to premium potting mix. Biochar, the product of slow pyrolysis or burning without oxygen, has attracted significant interest from both sides of politics because of its potential to draw down large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while generating energy. Biochar is recognised under the federal Carbon Farming Initiative, meaning PacPyro will be able to sell carbon credits to polluters liable under the proposed federal carbon tax regime, as well as electricity into the grid and renewable energy certificates. Ms Downie said at a carbon price of $23 a tonne, the project would generate credits worth $1 million a year. "If the [carbon tax] goes through, there's going to be billions of dollars in this space."

Lismore to host coal seam gas forum

The New South Wales Government will hold two public hearings into the coal seam gas industry in the north coast region. A committee has been established to conduct the hearings. Lismore is the first in NSW and witnesses are being called to give their opinions later this month. The hearings will then travel to Taree in October. Committee chairman Robert Brown says if people share similar views, they should form a group to represent them at the meeting. Submissions to the coal seam gas inquiry close tomorrow.

Total Arctic sea ice at record low in 2010: study

The minimum summertime volume of Arctic sea ice fell to a record low last year, researchers said in a study to be published shortly, suggesting that thinning of the ice had outweighed a recovery in area. The study estimated that last year broke the previous, 2007 record for the minimum volume of ice, which is calculated from a combination of sea ice area and thickness. The research adds to a picture of rapid climate change at the top of the world that could see the Arctic Ocean ice-free within decades, spurring new oil exploration opportunities but possibly also disrupted weather patterns far afield and a faster rise in sea levels. The authors developed a model predicting thickness across the Arctic Ocean based on actual observations of winds, air and ocean temperatures. "The real worrisome fact is downward trend over the last 32 years," said Axel Schweiger, lead author of the paper, referring to a satellite record of changes in the Arctic. He was emailing Reuters at the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, in the Arctic Ocean between the Norwegian island of Svalbard and the North Pole. "(It fell) by a large enough margin to establish a statistically significant new record," said the authors in their paper titled "Uncertainty in modeled Arctic sea ice volume." The researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle checked the model results against real readings of ice thickness using limited submarine and satellite data.

China moves in on Western solar power industries

China is emerging as the dominant force in the manufacture of solar panels in a world desperate for renewable sources of energy, as collapsing prices and disillusion over government subsidies has hobbled US efforts to take a lead in the development of the new industry. Prices of solar panels have fallen by more than 40 per cent in the past year, as a result of increased manufacturing capacity and disappointing demand, and the US was reeling yesterday from news that taxpayers may have lost more than half-a-billion dollars on one solar energy firm that shut its doors this week. China manufactured about 40 per cent of the solar panels produced in the world last year, from a standing start five years earlier, and the largest single producer is a Chinese firm called Suntech Power Holdings. Some in the US solar industry have criticised the Chinese for heavily subsidising their own firms, via grants of land for manufacturing plants and cheap loans. The United Steelworkers union filed a lawsuit last year asking the federal government to investigate China's clean energy subsidies and other policies and to pursue the matter through the World Trade Organisation. But the shake-out in the US also reflects the collapsing prices for solar panels which has resulted from new production capacity in China, Malaysia and the Philippines, and from disappointing demand in Continental Europe, whose governments are most enthusiastically pushing solar power. Uncertainty over regulation of prices in Italy led to a sudden drop-off of demand there, and adoption was also slower than expected in Germany this year.