The Algae.Tec facility is located next to the Manilidra Group's ethanol production facility, which is the largest in Australia. Algae Tec will take carbon dioxide from the ethanol plant to feed algae growth.

Algae.Tec is one of a few advanced biofuels companies globally with an enclosed modular engineered technology designed to grow algae on an industrial scale and produce biofuels for transportation use. Algae.Tec's enclosed module system is designed to produce algae biomass in virtually any environment.system while needing less than one tenth the land of pond growth systems.

Algae.Tec's Executive Chairman, Roger Stroud, said that the commissioning process was on track for production of algae biomass in early June, ramping up to capacity by the end of June.

Algae.Tec has carbon capture biofuels projects underway in Sri Lanka and in China and an arrangement with Lufthansa for aviation fuel studies.

The Shoalhaven One bioreactors were assembled and shipped from Atlanta, Georgia.

The statement followed an attempt by Marrickville Council to use its planning powers to block mining at the proposed location. The Council renewed recycling firm Dial-A-Dump’s permission to operate on the land but added a condition that banned exploration or extraction of coal seam gas

Jacinta Green, President of the Stop Coal Seam Gas group said that the site remains the only licenced petroleum exploration drilling location in Sydney and that the group would now write to Dart Energy asking it to formally rescind its approval to drill at the site and would also ask on the government to revoke it.

For more information on coal seam gas drilling, see The Fracking FAQs on our sister site, GreenBiz Cafe.

The report says that the weight of scientific evidence is that the climate is changing and will continue to do so and that Australians will need to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate. The changes include average temperatures and sea levels rising, rainfall patterns changing and increasing risk of extreme weather events.

It says that helping people, business and government deal with changes that have already apparent, such as climate variability and increased extreme weather, should be a priority.

Doing this will require:

• reducing tax, transfer and regulatory arrangements that impede the mobility of labour and capital,
• improving information on climate risks,
• clarifying the roles and responsibilities of local governments,
• improving emergency management arrangements and
• avoiding regulatory distortions in insurance markets.

The report says that governments should also be taking preparatoory action to help manage longer term future effects of climate change. This includes:

• producing and disseminating localised climate projections,
• designing flexible planning regulation to respond to uncertain climate change impacts, and
• developing approaches to managing risks to existing settlements.

The successful applicants are:

• James Cook University which will investigate the relationship between common biochar feedstock types and pyrolysis conditions to the proportion of stable carbon in the resultant biochar.
• The CSIRO which will establish a large number of high quality biochar demonstration sites to demonstrate the applicability of biochar in a broad range of agricultural and land management situations.
• The North East Catchment Authority which will produce biochar from woody weeds, establish a number of biochar field sites and trials and will communicate the benefits of biochar to farmers,
• Monash University which will demonstrate the potential of biochar and biochar/compost blends to increase soil carbon in native woody bioenergy crops. and
• The South Australian No Till Farmers Association which will demonstrate how degraded dairy pastures in the Lower Murray can be transformed by integrating a biochar management system.

The membrane distillation technology uses waste heat to evaporate waste water through a fine membrane. The evaporated water condenses on the other side of the membrane as treated water – at above tap water standard – for re-use.

Conventional evaporative desalination systems require temperatures of 70°C or higher but the membrane distillation technology can use waste heat as low as 30°C

The three-month trial of the process was conducted at Melbourne’s gas-fired Newport Power Station.

Project leader, Associate Professor Mike Duke, said that “If it were scaled up to a continuously operating industry of similar size to Newport Power Station, it could desalinate around 7 million litres of water per day, which is the equivalent of supplying fresh water to about 25,000 people in Melbourne.”

In 2007, the Govenrmant launched a $100 million scheme to offset CO₂ emissions by planting 100 million trees and rehabilitating 200,000 hectares of peatland on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan. The project was to be completed within five years.

With the target completion date approaching, $30 million has been spent but only 50,000 seedlings have been planted and the reflooding of peatlands has yet to start. AusAID now expects that only 25,000 hectares of peatland will be rehabilitated.

AusAID acknowledged that progress has been slow but said it was in line with similar efforts elsewhere. The project has been extented for at least another year and1.4 million seedlings are being raised for future planting.

The simulation found that existing "off-the-shelf" wind, photovoltaic, biofuelled gas turbines and hydroelectric sources, together with concentrated solar thermal power with thermal storage (which is in limited commercial production) could have met all of the electricity demand in 2010.

The study concluded that the best way to meet the demand for electricity is to abandon the idea that current "baseload" power sources need to be replaced by alternative "baseload" sources. Instead, reliability can be maintained by having storage and as great a diversity of locations as possible, together with the capacity to meet large peak loads.

One of the paper’s authors, Dr Mark Diesendorf, told the ABC that the model did not assume any improvements in demand management even though "we are are very close to having a smart grid". He pointed out that "currently, if supply fails to meet demand, it is possible to offload very big consumers of electricity, like aluminium smelters, for up to two hours."

In the U.S., Sungevity asks potential customers to provide their address and the amount of electricity that they use. Without visiting the customer, Sungevity then provides a fixed "iQuote" using satellite imaging  The quote is for the lease of solar panels which, togeher with the cost of any residual electricity consumed, should be less than the cost of electricity from the grid. The customer has no upfront costs.

Sungevity’s business has expanded rapidly in the U.S., growing by a factor of ten between 2010 and 2011.

The report confirms that post-combustion carbon dioxide capture technology operates effectively under Australian conditions and is now technically available to the industry as the first stage in the carbon dioxide capture and storage chain.

Post-combustion carbon dioxide capture test were carried out at the Munmorah power station in New South Wales and the Tarong power station in Queensland. The results showed that the the technology was able to capture more than 85% of the carbon dioxide, along with other gases such as sulphur dioxide, from the power station flue gases.

However, the costs from additional capital investment and loss of efficiency at the power station would result in a 30% loss in power station efficiency.

The study did not cover the further difficulties or cost of storing the captured CO₂ or of transporting it to the storage site.