Ukraine War Leads To New Investment In Kazakhstan

By The Jamestown Foundation - May 07, 2023

• Kazakhstan is in talks with 43 major international companies based in Russia regarding their relocation to the Central Asian country.
• 
  
• Less than a month after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan began negotiating with hundreds of Russia-based foreign firms about their possible relocation to his country.
• 
  
• Top priorities for President Tokaev’s administration include both efforts to diversify its economy away from over-reliance on hydrocarbon exports as well as attract more FDI.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin began his ill-fated “special military operation” (SVO)  WAR against Ukraine, subsequent international sanctions imposed in response produced the slowly mounting hemorrhaging of foreign firms based in the Russian Federation to other post-Soviet states, with many choosing to relocate to Kazakhstan. On April 19, Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov told participants in a government meeting—held to discuss his nation’s socioeconomic development—that his government is in talks with 43 major international companies based in Russia regarding their relocation to the Central Asian country. According to Smailov, beyond these 43 firms considering the shift, 24 foreign companies have already moved to Kazakhstan. Businesses that have relocated their base of operations from Russia to Kazakhstan include Honeywell, InDriver, Weir Minerals, Ural Motorcycles, Fortescue, TikTok, Koppert and Emerson. According to the same reports, discussions for the same continue with Boeing, EPAM Systems, Youngsan, Skoda Transportation, GE Healthcare and Philips (Tengri News, April 19).

Corporations began to fear the fiscal consequences of running afoul of a series of increasingly harsh sanctions against Russia after the start of Putin’s SVO. The rising exodus of foreign firms seeking more benign opportunities for foreign direct investment (FDI) coincided with increased efforts by Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s most prosperous nation, to secure more FDI.

The volume of foreign interest was not insignificant; on December 22, 2022, Kazakh Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Almas Aidarov stated that less than a month after the SVO started, Kazakhstan began negotiating with hundreds of Russia-based foreign firms about their possible relocation to his country. Aidarov said at a briefing to Kazakhstan’s Central Communications Service (???, or CCS):

Since the beginning of the conflict and the announcement of sanctions against the Russian economy, we have identified 362 companies that have publicly announced their withdrawal or reduction of their activities in the Russian market. These 362 companies are foreign companies that have operated in Russia and are of interest to us. Since March, we have reached out to the parent companies of these brands with a proposal to relocate to Kazakhstan. To date, 62 companies have given us a positive response that they are ready to consider Kazakhstan as an alternative platform (Sputnik Kazakhstan, December 22, 2022).

As top priorities of Kazakh President Tokaev’s administration include both efforts to diversify its economy away from over-reliance on hydrocarbon exports as well as attract more FDI, the stampede of foreign companies exiting Russia represents an unexpected potential windfall. Three months after the SVO began, Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Mukhtar Tleuberdi visited the US, where his delegation held talks with prominent businessmen in New York and Washington D.C. According to official Kazakh central bank statistics, as of October 2021, FDI in Kazakhstan totaled $170 billion, including $40.4 billion from the US (US State Department, 2023). The Kazakh delegation held meetings with Boeing, Valmont Industries, Honeywell, Pfizer, Champion Foods, Paramount, SMP Robotics, LA Solar Group, Ardmore Capital and JPMorgan Chase & Co. officials. According to Merzhan Iusupov, Chairman of the Board of Kazakh Invest, a national company responsible for attracting FDI to the country: “In connection with the relocation of many companies to Kazakhstan, we express our readiness to create all the institutional conditions for establishing direct interaction with foreign companies by providing opportunities for moving to Kazakhstan or opening joint ventures” (Interfax, May 24, 2022).

The outgoing river of foreign businesses flowing out from the Russian market may soon turn into a raging flood. On April 25, Putin signed a decree entitled: “On the temporary management of certain property,” which established a mechanism for the introduction of temporary management of foreign assets in Russia (Official Internet Portal for Legal Information, April 25).

Putin’s decree provides for the “temporary management” of foreign assets held by the Russian subsidiaries of Finland’s Fortum Oyj and Germany’s Unipro (both energy companies) by the Federal Property Management Agency, in order to generate assets “of paramount importance for the stable functioning of the Russian energy sector” (Vedomosti, April 25).

The decree’s legal framework makes it possible to introduce “temporary” external management of foreign assets in the event that Russia, Russian legal entities or individuals are deprived of the right of ownership of property abroad, which could create a threat to Russia’s national, economic or energy security.

With the notable exception of Belarus, Putin’s relentless SVO against Ukraine has generated a growing degree of coolness in post-Soviet nations towards their former Russian comrades. Russia’s recent moves against foreign business entities remaining within the confines of the Federation are likely to promote still more to leave, with nearby Kazakhstan appearing like the prime alternative in the post-Soviet Eurasian space. In 2021, global FDI totaled $1.58 trillion, up 64 percent from 2020’s exceptionally low levels. Kazakhstan remains the number one FDI destination in post-Soviet Central Asia, absorbing approximately 70 percent of total FDI regional inflows (Lloyds Bank, April 2023). As Kazakhstan continues to reform its economic and legal structures to better accommodate foreign and domestic investment, it seems likely that many of the new fiscal refugees from Russia will consider making their “temporary” exile to the steppe more permanent.

By John Daly via Jamestown.org

I HAVE THE SNEAKY SUSPICION THAT JAMESTOWN IS LIKE PRAGER WHICH WAS A FRONT FOR CIA RELEASES OF CLEANSED DATA

Solving The Space Problem For America’s Solar Industry

By Haley Zaremba - May 07, 2023

• A combination of ambitious emissions reduction targets and the financial support of the Inflation Reduction Act is set to send the U.S. solar industry into overdrive in the coming years.
• 
  
• One issue with expanding solar production is a lack of space, but installing solar panels on the rooftops of warehouses and distribution centers across the nation could help solve that problem.
• 
  
• 450,000 of these buildings already exist in the United States and represent a staggering 16.4 billion square feet of roof space, which could produce 186 TWh of electricity.

Meeting national climate goals in the United States will require a rapid expansion of solar energy production. Under the pressure of the United Nation’s issuance of a “code red” for humanity and with the added stimulus of the Inflation Reduction Act, solar power projects are getting bigger and more ambitious in scale all the time. But there’s a major problem facing all this growth – projects that big require a lot of land, and not everyone is happy about it. What’s more, it doesn’t come cheaply. 

Late last year, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company released an analytic report that included land as one of three key challenges facing the renewable revolution, in addition to issues with arduous and lengthy bureaucratic processes and unprepared power grids. Solar farms need huge tracts of land to operate at scale, and there is often fierce competition for those parcels, driving up prices for solar developers. “Utility-scale solar and wind farms require at least ten times as much space per unit of power as coal- or natural gas–fired power plants, including the land used to produce and transport the fossil fuels,” McKinsey reports, adding that “large solar farms span thousands of acres.”

What’s more, the massive scale of these solar farms can upset their neighbors. Already, there is major pushback from rural America, where the vast majority of these projects are planned. Pushing a green energy agenda in deeply red states is hard enough, but it’s particularly tricky when you’re competing with local agriculture for land rights, and building what some see as massive eyesores in rural residents’ backyards. Solar expansion in the United States has already been majorly stalled by protests from disgruntled groups in America’s heartland. “Over the past year, solar projects in Ohio, Kentucky and Nevada have all been delayed or sunk by irked local people,” the Guardian recently reported. There has also been backlash from local and state governments, with measures to restrict renewable energy facilities successfully passed in 31 states.

With all this in mind, it seems daunting – if not impossible – to sketch out a feasible pathway toward installing the whopping 60 GW of solar capacity each year from 2025-2030 that will be necessary to decarbonize the national power grid. But a new report from Environment California and the Frontier Group gives some hope for continued solar expansion in the United States without running into major land-use arguments and roadblocks. The solution is simple: land use must be shared. 

In this case, the proposed solution is to put solar panels on the rooftops of warehouses and distribution centers across the nation. All told, there are more than 450,000 of these buildings already existing in the United States, together representing a staggering 16.4 billion square feet of roof space. Covering this space will photovoltaic solar panels would be able to generate 186 TWh of electricity, or enough electricity to power nearly 20 million homes. “Generating this estimated 186 TWh of electricity would be equivalent to more than 112 million metric tons of carbon emissions avoided,” PV Magazine reports. “This is equivalent to the emissions contribution of over 24 million gas-powered cars over the course of the year. It would also preserve an estimated 376,000 acres, nearly double the size of New York City, from being sacrificed for electricity generation.”

In addition to putting more solar panels in industrial parks, there are plenty of other shared land-use solutions already being used in rural contexts around the world that could be applied in the United States as well. In Germany, farmers are growing hay in the furrows between rows of standing solar panels. In France, grapevines are growing in the shade of solar panels on vineyards, while in Japan it’s tea leaves that benefit from the panel-produced shade. In Canada as well as in Australia, sheep share their pastures with solar panels,  providing welcome shade to the animals. In fact, there is a whole field of research around building synergies between agricultural needs and energy needs, called agrivoltaics. Does this solve the climate crisis? No. Does it solve the land issue? Not entirely. But it’s a hell of a good start. 

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Is Clean Energy Really More Expensive Than Traditional Energy?

By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles - May 07, 2023

• The claim that clean energy is more expensive than traditional energy sources is frequently repeated and on the surface certainly appears true.
• 
  
• If you delve deeper into the total costs and future costs of clean energy, it is a far more reasonable proposition than it may originally appear.
• 
  
• There are multiple projects with the potential to completely disrupt energy markets, making even this debate about the immediate cost of clean energy obsolete.

Judging from the news story, a PR firm had an assignment: to inform the world that clean energy prices exceed dirty energy prices, just as Republicans in Congress try to repeal large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (which boosts clean energy). Maybe a coincidence. Politics is not our area of expertise. But the arguments that were made sure read like talking points that politicians repeat in cable news interviews:   

• Clean new industries will need workers, especially engineers, and won’t get them by raiding staff from fast food restaurants. This is true, of course. The new industries will have to compete for experienced workers, attract American students into engineering, entice engineers from abroad, and offer competitive wages. The old industries will have to compete for the workforce with the new industries. That’s what happens in markets.
• The new policies will upend our decades-long dependence on global markets to provide goods and services at the lowest prices. Well, isn’t the point of going local to protect our national security? Extra security costs money, just as insurance does. So, do you want security or low prices?
• Government handouts to particular technologies distort the market. Economists agree that the least market-distorting way to deal with the problem is to tax carbon and let the market figure out how to reduce emissions. But let’s be realistic. Congress will not approve any new tax. So Biden had the choice of a sub-optimal policy or doing nothing. As Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

These dazzlingly unhelpful bullet points don’t mention a principal reason why clean energy prices may exceed dirty energy prices: the latter do not include costs borne by society, not the producer or user.  If the cost of damage to health or the environment were included, the dirty product might cost as much as or more than the clean product. So, switching to a clean product might affect the price paid but not the cost to society. 

Marketers and product developers might brush off the argument altogether. New products often sell for more than seemingly similar old products. Consumers who want to be first on the block willingly pay more, especially for a product they see as different. And the cost and price of new products decline as producers attain economies of scale. What’s the big deal, then?

Maybe a big part of the problem is that incumbent energy companies, which have political influence and money don’t spend much on research and development, relatively speaking, do not develop new products and will lose out if the new competitors succeed. So they have every reason to lobby against the new competitors, especially if the government is giving them a boost.  ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, between them, spend only 0.3% of revenues on research and development, and the electricity and natural gas industries in the United States around 0.1% of revenues. On the other hand, automotive giants General Motors and Ford, together, spend 5% of revenues on research and development, and fuel cell manufacturers Bloom Energy and Plug Power 13%. Our point is not that when you don’t spend on your future, you might not have one, but rather if you don’t spend on improving your products you may not find ways to reduce their costs or improve their attractiveness, while your competitors are doing just that.

Projections show a continued decline in the costs of alternative energy that will soon bring them below legacy energy costs. But that analysis does not take into account  any number of projects that could disrupt the energy market even more:

• Co-fire fossil fuel plants with ammonia. (A project that involves 

   major Japanese utilities and global ammonia producers.)  

• Improve perovskites, which could substantially reduce solar costs and   

   revolutionize its uses. (Work ongoing in China and USA.)  

• Turn hydrogen into the new storage, fuel, and energy transfer medium. (Huge projects underway throughout the world.) 
•  Establish the existence of commercial deposits of renewable hydrogen underground. (A small-scale Australian enterprise with potentially big prospects.) 
• Demonstrate via an expensive exploratory drill hole in Utah the possibility that we can tap deep, dry rock geothermal energy (enough to replicate the U.S. generating fleet 500 times over). 
• Build superconductor grids to connect renewable energy. (A European energy firm wants to do just that, arguing that the existing grid cannot do it. What about here?)   

Any of these possibilities could dramatically raise the prospects for decarbonization, largely by improving the cost and reliability of electrification. We would get a better notion of future costs by looking forward not backward.

By Leonard S. Hyman and William I. Tilles for Oilprice.com

Biden Is Losing Young Climate-Conscious Voters

By ZeroHedge - May 03, 2023

• Young voters were large supporters of Biden in the last Presidential elections.
• 
  
• Younger Americans are exceptionally aggressive and vocal on climate policies. 
• 
  
• As friendly as Biden has been to the eco-left, and outright hostile to our domestic, traditional energy industries, he is still facing backlash from these eco-centric voters.

Now that President Biden has made his 2024 run official, he has plenty of work to do if he hopes to shore up his lagging support among key constituencies. According to a recent NBC News survey, a full 70 percent of Americans do not want the President to run again. One demographic to watch is younger voters, who backed Biden by a wide 61-36 margin in 2020. 

Younger Americans are exceptionally aggressive and vocal on climate policies. Nearly two-thirds (62%), support phasing out fossil fuels entirely, said Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research Center.  According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics poll, an amazing half of those polled prefer the government do more to curb climate change, even if U.S. economic growth is damaged in the process.

BIDEN AND HIS ADMIN ARE NOT ANTI ENERGY INDUSTRY PROOF IS BELOW, NOT MENTIONED IS THE BIDEN ADMIN COPPER MINING SUPPORT

As friendly as Biden has been to the eco-left, and outright hostile to our domestic, traditional energy industries, he is still facing backlash from these eco-centric voters over three recent decisions dealing with energy development

 As always, my state of Alaska is at the epicenter. 

First, the President – through the Department of Interior – approved Alaska’s Willow oil and gas development project last month. His decision elicited a collective groan of disgust and disapproval from the environmental movement.  They’d dedicated years opposing the project, and spent the weeks ahead of the final decision bombarding social media, protesting outside of the White House and using their extensive, inside access to stop Willow from progressing.  

Afterward, they vented.

“Biden approved [Willow] knowing full well that it'll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is just appalling, particularly coming from an administration who has pledged to address the climate crisis, has pledged to address environmental injustice, has pledged to address the extinction crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who, along with other activist organizations, promptly took legal action to oppose the decision.

Next, Biden greenlit the export plan for Alaska Gasline Development Corp’s goal to build an 800-mile pipeline to bring trillions of cubic feet of gas from the North Slope to homes, businesses and eventually a tidewater port for export to Asia and other Pacific Rim countries.  Having previously been held up under the guise of environmental and Indigenous justice reviews, the approval on April 14 gave a significant boost to the $43 billion project.  

Environmentalists went apoplectic. “Joe Biden’s climate presidency is flying off the rails,” said Lukas Ross of Friends of the Earth. Ross pointed out this was the second U.S. approval of a “fossil-fuel mega-project” in as many months.  

PROOF

Finally, the tipping point for climate activists may have come on April 21, when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm penned a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), asking to “expeditiously” approve regulatory authorizations for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia. Granholm noted the gas pipeline can "play an important role as part of the clean energy transition".

Once again, green activists hit the roof, including former National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) attorney and current Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), who stated bluntly, “She (Granholm) sounds like a cheerleader for the fossil fuel industry; it’s really quite pathetic.”

The same groups who previously cheered when the Green New Deal was introduced, celebrated when the Keystone Pipeline was shuttered and nearly danced in the streets when copper mines in Alaska and Minnesota were ruled off-limits to development are now blasting Biden for losing his way on what they see as an ‘existential threat’ to their survival, and turning his back on mankind.

The group Gen-Z for Change recently put out a statement that clearly spells out the position of many young voters. "There is no deeper form of betrayal than watching a president who has claimed to value the voices of youth…blatantly disregard one of our generations' largest and clearest movements."  Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was even more blunt: ''Young people are plugged in and more informed than they have ever been about climate change,'' he said. ''Now they're feeling stabbed in the back.'' If Mr. Biden doesn't reverse course, ''young people stay home in 2024, that's the consequences.''

WISHFUL THINKING OF THE FOSSIL FOOLS

Make no mistake: Biden is a dedicated disciple to the green cult. If given another four years, he will take steps toward fulfilling his promise to “end fossil fuel.” The next 17 months will determine whether Joe Biden will turn 86 in 2028 as a two-term President or defeated, one-term leader. Ironically, voters much younger will make or break his fate, and they see the world through a very green lens. Right now, they’re seeing red, and that spells trouble for Team Biden.

By Rick Whitbeck for RealClear Wire, via Zerohedge.com

New Barents Sea study points to how global sea level will continue to rise

"It demonstrates the potential enormity of the problems society may face over the coming centuries" 

 UiT scientists on the new data from the Barents Sea.

Научно-исследовательское судно «Хелмер Ханссен» у северо-западного побережья Шпицбергена. Фото: Келвин Шеклтон

Read in Russian | Читать по-русски

By  Elizaveta Vereykina

BARENTS OBSERVER
April 20, 2023

A recently published study from geologists at UiT The Arctic University of Norway has provided new insight into what was happening beneath the Barents Sea ice sheet around 15,000 years ago. The data gathered will help to better understand the processes occurring under present-day climate change.

What was discovered?

According to a global consensus of scientists it is virtually certain that global sea level will continue to rise over the 21st century. For the 900 million people (1 in 10 globally) living in coastal zones around the world now, including in coastal mega-cities, this danger is particularly acute.

“Unravelling the glacial changes that occurred in the marine setting of the Barents Sea during the warming at the end of the last ice age is important as it gives us a unique long-term perspective into how ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica today could respond in the future.” UiT researcher Dr Henry Patton says to The Barents Observer.

For the first time, this research which has been conducted over the last 5 years, has put some numbers on how fast this former ice sheet in the Barents Sea retreated

“Like the present-day ice sheets, this Barents Sea ice sheet was immense, reaching up to 3 km thick in places, but we are starting to think that the whole system collapsed very quickly, raising global sea level by many metres in just a few centuries,” says Patton.

UiT team examining glacial sediments obtained in a core taken from the Barents Sea floor. The sediments are collected within a plastic liner roughly 10 cm wide (shown in the background). By examining the nature of these seafloor sediments more closely we can learn more about the type of environment they were deposited in. 

Photo: Mauro Pau, 2021

Newly discovered seafloor deposits have provided new information on how fast this vast ice sheet was shrinking through the central Barents Sea 15,000 years ago. The data the team found shows the ice sheet was retreating between 580 and 1600 m per year on average, for at least 91 years. At this pace, most of the ice sheet is likely to have disappeared from across the entire Barents Sea within 1000 years, raising global sea level by around 6 m in the process.

This geological data shows that the continuous, fast retreat of ice sheets over many decades, and possibly centuries, is not unprecedented under a rapidly changing climate. Chronological data constraining this ice-sheet collapse has previously been a long-standing knowledge gap.

Dr Henry Patton examining newly collected multibeam echosounder data in the instrument room onboard Helmer Hanssen. Photo by Mauro Pau, 2021.

“If our numbers are correct this collapse event would have contributed to an extraordinarily fast pace of sea level rise, - Dr Patton says - and it demonstrates the potential enormity of the problems society may face over the coming centuries if the current ice sheets continue to destabilise”.

Yet, he added, pinning down these future quantities of melt over the coming decades and centuries is not straightforward as the feedbacks that operate between the oceans, climate and ice are highly nonlinear.

How was it done?

To uncover information about the glacial past published in this study, the UiT team has been surveying and mapping the Barents Sea area from research vessels since 2020. Sometimes scientists would stay on the research ship for up to three weeks. The team in their research also incorporated open data collected by the Norwegian Hydrographic Service through the MAREANO programme.

Scientists Calvin Shackleton and Henry Patton with other team members in the ‘wet lab’ onboard Helmer Hanssen in 2015, waiting for a sediment core to be retrieved 300 metres below from the Barents Sea floor. When the team works on the ship deck it’s important for them to wear clothes that are visible and warm.

By piecing together these high-resolution snapshots surveyed from the Barents Sea floor - like in a jigsaw puzzle - a clearer picture of the glacial history of this region can emerge. The mapping included in this UiT study comes from a very remote region in the central Barents Sea, near the Norwegian - Russian border. Scientists believe this region hosted some of the last remnants of the last ice sheet before it finally melted away.Here you can use a map demonstrating an interactive reconstruction of the Eurasian ice sheet during the last ice age

Such observational data are vital for guiding numerical simulations that try to reconstruct the behaviour of the old ice sheets. Lead researcher of the study, Dr Calvin Shackleton from the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, points out that satellite data, which has been used to monitor the present-day ice sheets over the last 40 years, are unable to observe the processes happening underneath the ice sheet. This makes the geological data left behind by these older ice sheets like in the Barents Sea such a valuable archive to investigate.

“The detection of traces of water at the interface between the ice sheet and seafloor is of importance as the water acts as a lubrication, allowing the ice above to flow faster and thus more quickly transfer its mass to the more climate-sensitive regions at lower elevations.”

From left to right: scientists Calvin Shackleton and Henry Patton onboard Helmer Hanssen with a glacial fjord in Svalbard in the background.

 Photo by Mariana Esteves

Research ship Helmer Hanssen acquiring data in the Barents Sea in 2020. 

Photo by Henry Patton.

Why is this important?

Continued sea level rise is one of the most concerning processes occurring around the planet now. There have been multiple statements at the highest political levels about an existential threat not only for big cities from London to Shanghai, but also for many small island nations.

Earlier this year the UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in a statement: “For the hundreds of millions of people living in small island developing States and other low-lying coastal areas around the world, sea-level rise is a torrent of trouble….The impact of rising seas is already creating new sources of instability and conflict” he said.

According to Dr Patton, quantifying this sea level rise and being able to adapt to its impacts are key aspects driving the need to better understand the science behind present-day climate change. Specifically, as he says, it’s now visible from how water carved the seafloor and deposited sediments that meltwater was abundant beneath the Barents Sea ice sheet, and thus able to regulate how the ice above flowed as it collapsed. Some of this water, researchers think, was fed from the ice-sheet surface, showing that this Arctic ice sheet was increasingly susceptible to melting as temperatures in the atmosphere rose.

A contemporary glacier in the Swiss Alps. Photo by Henry Patton.

Another recent study has similarly mapped glacial landforms in the Norwegian Sea, showing how fast the last ice sheet over Scandinavia retreated back into Norway at around the same time the Barents Sea ice sheet was also collapsing. The rates they found are exceptionally higher, at 55 to 610 m per day (in comparison to the 580 to 1600 m per year from UiT), and faster than anything ever observed today or in the last ice age. These very fast rates, however, were likely only ever sustained over a period of days to months.

Nevertheless, both studies highlight the profound speed by which ice sheets can quickly destabilise and lose mass, and provide a strong warning on the importance of better understanding the nature of contemporary climate change and its impact on society. People need to know what dangers to face in the future. But, as scientists say, the research is still ongoing:

“The Barents Sea is a very large place and the mapping of this glacial imprint left behind on the Barents Sea floor is still far from complete”, says Dr Patton.

The massive hole in the ice in today’s Switzerland, Gornergletscher in the Alps - that’s the way how water that melts on the surface can be transported underneath the ice to lubricate it, same as it happened in the past. 

Photo by Henry Patton

The geographical area of the conducted research on the border between Norway and Russia.

The red line outlines a channel where water used to flow beneath the ice sheets. The green areas are sediment piles deposited by this water, and give indication of how fast the ice margin retreated.

 

Norway outlines major wind power development in Arctic waters

A government appointed expert group draws up 20 offshore areas suitable for wind power development. Four of them are in the Barents Sea, and one is located along the maritime border to Russia.

By

Atle Staalesen

    

April 27, 2023

Norwegian authorities are increasingly under pressure to build new capacities for production of renewable power. In March this year, two areas in the North Sea were presented as sites for wind farms. Now, another 18 acreages are identified.

According to the expert group headed by the country’s Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE), there are suitable areas for wind power farms all along the Norwegian coast, from the southernmost waters in the North Sea to the far northern parts of the Barents Sea.

Among the four areas in the Barents Sea is the block Nordavind A (“North Wind A”) located at 71° North and covering an area of about 2,500 square km. It is situated about 50 km north of the mainland and was part of the waters delineated Norway and Russia in the 2010 land mark border deal.

The Norwegian oil industry long saw this as a highly prospective area, but exploration drilling gave no major discoveries, and the companies subsequently decided to abandon the area.

According to Norway’s Petroleum Directorate, it is important that new offshore wind farms are not built in areas of major relevance for the oil industry.

“For us, it is crucial that potential values from petroleum and CO2 [storage] are not lost as a consequence of wind power development,” says Kjersti Dahle from the Directorate.

“Some of the proposed areas appear challenging with regard the petroleum,” she admits.

Norwegian authorities intend to build as much as 30 GW of new capacity, which will mean almost a doubling of the country’s existing electricity generation.

All proposed wind power blocks are now to be subject to further studies before decisions on opening and development are taken. Tenders are unlikely to be held before 2025, the expert group informs.

On the same day as the authorities announced the new blocks, oil company Vår Energi informed that it had entered into cooperation with wind power developers Odfjell Oceanwind and Source Galileo about a pilot project on floating offshore wind at its Goliat oil field. Currently, the oil production installations are powered by electricity from the mainland.

The project is named GoliatVind and aims at using the 75 MW power cable to help increase the level of renewable power production in the Finnmark region, the company informs.




Offshore wind power in the horizon. Photo: Atle Staalesen

IAEA assesses regulatory preparedness for Fukushima water release

05 May 2023

An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) task force reviewing the safety of Japan's plan to discharge treated water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea has released its fifth report. The report is focused on Japan's domestic regulatory review of the water release.

Water storage tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi plant site (Image: Tepco)

It covers the observations of the task force mission to Tokyo from 16 to 20 January 2023 to assess Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) activities related to the planned discharge.

At the Fukushima Daiichi site, contaminated water - in part used to cool melted nuclear fuel - is treated by the ALPS system, which removes most of the radioactive contamination, with the exception of tritium. This treated water is currently stored in about 1000 tanks on site. The total tank storage capacity amounts to about 1.37 million cubic metres and all the tanks are expected to reach full capacity in late 2023 or early 2024.

Japan announced in April 2021 it planned to discharge treated water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi plant into the sea over a period of about 30 years, and asked the IAEA to review its plans against IAEA safety standards.

In its latest report, the task force noted a number of key outcomes from the latest mission, including that the NRA agreed to require Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to review optimisation of protection for the discharge of ALPS treated water based on operational experience and associated monitoring following the start of the discharges. The NRA further agreed to establish a framework for revisiting discharge limits, operating limits, and conditions to reflect the optimisation of protection, "in a similar manner, if needed".

The task force also acknowledged that the NRA has conducted a review to determine that sufficient evidence exists that the source term contains all the radiologically significant radionuclides and that it does not exclude, in the assessment, any radionuclides that could be significant contributors to the dose to the public or to flora and fauna.

It found that the NRA's approach to enforce controls on the occupational exposure of Tepco employees is sufficient for compliance with international safety standards.

The task force also acknowledged that the NRA has focused on involving the public in the regulatory review process. The task force will continue to review how public consultations and the involvement of interested parties are handled by the NRA as the regulatory process continues.

"The task force has seen that the NRA serves as the independent regulatory body within Japan and holds the responsibility for assessing the safety of the proposed discharge of ALPS treated water," said Gustavo Caruso, director of the IAEA's Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, and chair of the task force. "However, we will continue to review how the NRA conducts its regulatory process leading up to, and after, the proposed discharges of treated water".

The task force's safety review continues. The IAEA said one more report will be issued on independent sampling and analysis aspects, before the final comprehensive report detailing the collected findings and conclusions of the task force is issued.

Japan intends to start discharging the ALPS-treated water in 2023, pending Tepco's completion of necessary domestic regulatory actions.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News