Marine Trackers Show How Warming Waters Affect Australian Sea Life And Beyond

ABC News - Rhiannon Shine

Acoustic signal receivers were installed in coastal waters around Australia for the massive study. (Supplied: IMOS/Fabrice Jaine)

New data mapping the movements of Australian marine life over the past decade will provide insight into how climate change might affect sea animal behaviour, researchers say.

The study by researchers at the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) and Macquarie University has tracked the whereabouts of 117 marine species, ranging from sharks and saltwater crocodiles to sea turtles and jellyfish using sound-detecting underwater receivers.
The receivers pick up and record signals from acoustic tags that have been placed on fish and marine mammals.
Lead author Xavier Hoenner said the researchers collected and quality controlled 49.6 million acoustic detections from tagged animals.

Researchers are interested in how warming waters are affecting species like bull sharks. (Supplied: Jayne Jenkins )

"The established IMOS Animal Tracking Facility network, consisting of nearly 2,000 receiving stations located around the country, allowed us to track 3,777 Australian sea animals, including some of Australia's most iconic species," Dr Hoenner said.
IMOS Animal Tracking Facility leader Rob Harcourt said the data would help researchers to predict how animal behaviour might change in the future in response to warming waters.
"For example, in the case of bull sharks – a species we tracked that is known to be potentially dangerous – research has shown that they move within warmer waters, meaning it is important that we understand how they modify their movements in response to changes in ocean conditions and processes," Professor Harcourt said.
"We do have quite strong evidence that there are things like pulses of warm water that are coming down with the East Australian Current which is strengthening and has been strengthening over some time.
"With those water masses we find that fish are essentially staying in the same environment but that environment is actually moving.

"Over the course of the next few years we will be able to build some really complex models to allow us to predict what is going to happen as we understand more about the oceanography."

Marine life movements around Australia

Professor Harcourt said the tracking system showed some species travelled surprising distances.
"For instance, in Sydney Harbour the New South Wales government has been tagging bull sharks because of anxiety about people being bitten," he said.
"Our colleagues up in Townsville, which is about 2,400 kilometres away, also detected bull sharks and then discovered these were the same sharks that had been tagged in Sydney Harbour.
"We are now looking at their movements all the way up and down the coast over a number of years."
Some animals previously thought to be quite sedentary have also been proven to travel long distances.

The network of tracking devices consisted of nearly 2,000 receiving stations. (Supplied: IMOS)

"Sevengill sharks that are found in Tasmania have been detected over in South Australia," Professor Harcourt said.
"Sevengill sharks were thought to be quite restricted to really cold waters down here, and yet we know now that they go right up to South Australia, again, a couple of thousand kilometres away.
"That is potentially because of the way movements of water have changed."
Dr Hoenner said the tracking data was validated by a state of the art quality control algorithm developed in Hobart, which he expected to be used by other researchers around the world.
The algorithm identifies background noise signals and anomalous movements to strengthen the quality and re-usability of the data.
"There is a global need [for the quality control algorithm]," Dr Hoenner said.
"Everyone is spending a lot of time looking at the data and this could make the whole process a lot easier for everyone."
Professor Harcourt said the data, published in the nature journal Scientific Data, would help future investigations by other marine research groups.
"The data is available through the online Australian Ocean Data Network Portal, making it a very valuable resource for comparing the behaviour of marine animals today and in the future," he said.

Links

• Integrated Marine Observing System
• Integrated Marine Observing System Animal Tracking Facility
• Australian Ocean Data Network Portal
• East Australian Current
• Broadnose Sevengill Shark

Climate Change Projects Headline Innovation And Science Australia's 2030 Plan

AFR - David Marin-Guzman

Australia's chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel says the vocational educational and training system needs to be more responsive to changes in technology. Wayne Taylor

Restoring the Great Barrier Reef and de-carbonising the gas system have been pitched as "national mission" projects to inspire the next decade of innovation.
Innovation and Science Australia's 2030 strategy plan, to be released on Tuesday, proposes world-leading initiatives to raise the country's aspirations on what it can achieve akin to US President John F Kennedy's "moonshot" challenge.
According to the independent body's plan, the reef mission would restore and protect the reef from climate change, boosting scientific research while creating new products, start-ups and niche industries such as in bio-materials and 3D printers.
The Turnbull government's current Reef 2050 plan provided a "strong base" for the mission, the ISA said, but was primarily focused on direct threats to the reef such as the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.
"It does not have an explicit climate adaptation strategy and is therefore insufficient to safeguard the reef beyond 2030."
Minister for Jobs and Innovation Michaelia Cash claimed the government has already moved to action the ISA's recommendation, by "committing last week to fund groundbreaking research to preserve the Great Barrier Reef".
However, the government's $60 million reef package focuses on targeting the crown-of-thorns starfish and land-based run-offs, with just $6 million spent on research and development for adaptation.

'Hydrogen City'
The ISA's other national mission candidate was converting an entire city to clean hydrogen gas by 2030.
Zero-emission energy sources such as solar, wind or hydro would be used to produce the hydrogen by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
"This has never been done at the scale contemplated in this mission," the report said.
The technology improvements resulting from the large-scale deployment of hydrogen technologies would then create export opportunities and make Australia a leader in the field.
Public and private sectors would fund both projects at an estimated $500,000 over 10 years.
But the ISA's most "ideal" national mission would be to integrate DNA studies and precision medicine into the healthcare system.
The medicine mission would allow for early diagnosis and prevention of diseases, making Australia "the healthiest nation on earth".
The ISA said Australia was already "well connected" to international efforts in the area and the mission would build on the government's medical research future fund and $500 million already committed to the biomedical translation fund.

Skills shortage requires education revamp
At the heart of the ISA's innovation agenda was a re-booting of the educational and training system.
Despite recent fears that automation will destroy jobs, the ISA forecast that a "shortage of workers is a more likely problem than a shortage of jobs".
It forecast a looming retirement boom from an ageing population would create a 6 per cent skills shortage by 2030.
At the same time, technology meant 92 per cent of future jobs would need digital skills and 45 per cent would require people who can configure digital systems.
The ISA recommended "refining" immigration restrictions to attract specialists and entrepreneurs and increase training for teachers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
ISA deputy chairman and chief scientist Alan Finkel told The Australian Financial Review it was essential the future workforce had strong knowledge in disciplines as well as "21st century" skills such as creativity and problem-solving.
However, he said teachers' training and knowledge of their own disciplines needed to improve.
"There's no point raising the bar of students' aspirations if you don't also coach them to clear the bar."
The ISA recommended that teachers spend a minimum number of hours every year in professional development for their specific discipline to ensure their knowledge is up to date.
The report also called for a review of the vocational education and training system to ensure it is more responsive to new technologies and to link VET funding to employment outcomes.

Links

• 'National missions' set to reboot Malcolm Turnbull's innovation agenda
• Innovation and Science Australia
• ISA 2030 Strategy at a glance

Climate Scientists Explore Hidden Ocean Beneath Antarctica’s Largest Ice Shelf

The Conversation - Craig Stevens | Christina Hulbe

The team used hot-water drilling gear to melt a hole through Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf to explore the ocean below. Christina Hulbe, CC BY-ND

Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf is the world’s largest floating slab of ice: it’s about the size of Spain, and nearly a kilometre thick.
The ocean beneath, roughly the volume of the North Sea, is one of the most important but least understood parts of the climate system.
We are part of the multi-disciplinary Aotearoa New Zealand Ross Ice Shelf programme team, and have melted a hole through hundreds of metres of ice to explore this ocean and the ice shelf’s vulnerability to climate change. Our measurements show that this hidden ocean is warming and freshening - but in ways we weren’t expecting.


Instruments travelling 360m down a bore hole, from the snow-covered surface of the Ross Ice Shelf through to the ocean below the ice. After splash-down at about 60m, they move through the bubble-rich upper ice and down into the dark bubble-free lower reaches of the ice – passing embedded sediment that left the coast line centuries ago.

A hidden conveyor belt
All major ice shelves are found around the coast of Antarctica. These massive pieces of ice hold back the land-locked ice sheets that, if freed to melt into the ocean, would raise sea levels and change the face of our world.
An ice shelf is a massive lid of ice that forms when glaciers flow off the land and merge as they float out over the coastal ocean. Shelves lose ice by either breaking off icebergs or by melting from below. We can see big icebergs from satellites - it is the melting that is hidden.
Because the water flowing underneath the Ross Ice Shelf is cold (minus 1.9C), it is called a “cold cavity”. If it warms, the future of the shelf and the ice upstream could change dramatically. Yet this hidden ocean is excluded from all present models of future climate.

This satellite map shows the camp site on the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. Ross Ice Shelf Programme, CC BY-ND

There has only been one set of measurements of this ocean, made by an international team in the late 1970s. The team made repeated attempts, using several types of drills, over the course of five years. With this experience and newer, cleaner, technology, we were able to complete our work in a single season.
Our basic understanding is that seawater circulates through the cavity by flowing in at the sea bed as relatively warm, salty water. It eventually finds its way to the shore - except of course this is a shoreline under as much as 800 metres of ice. There it starts melting the shelf from beneath and flows across the shelf underside back towards the open ocean.

Peering through a hole in the ice
The New Zealand team – including hot water drillers, glaciologists, biologists, seismologists, oceanographers – worked from November through to January, supported by tracked vehicles and, when ever the notorious local weather permitted, Twin Otter aircraft.
As with all polar oceanography, getting to the ocean is often the most difficult part. In this case, we faced the complex task of melting a bore hole, only 25 centimetres in diameter, through hundreds of metres of ice.

A team of ice drillers from Victoria University of Wellington used hot water and a drilling system developed at Victoria to melt a hole through hundreds of metres of ice. Craig Stevens, CC BY-ND

But once the instruments are lowered more than 300m down the bore hole, it becomes the easiest oceanography in the world. You don’t get seasick and there is little bio-fouling to corrupt measurements. There is, however, plenty of ice that can freeze up your instruments or freeze the hole shut.

A moving world
Our camp in the middle of the ice shelf served as a base for this science, but everything was moving. The ocean is slowly circulating, perhaps renewing every few years. The ice is moving too, at around 1.6 metres each day where we were camped. The whole plate of ice is shifting under its own weight, stretching inexorably toward the ocean fringe of the shelf where it breaks off as sometimes massive icebergs. The floating plate is also bobbing up and down with the daily tides.

The team at work, preparing a mooring. Christina Hulbe, CC BY-ND

Things also move vertically through the shelf. As the layer stretches toward the front, it thins. But the shelf can also thicken as new snow piles up on top, or as ocean water freezes onto the bottom. Or it might thin where wind scours away surface snow or relatively warm ocean water melts it from below.
When you add it all up, every particle in the shelf is moving. Indeed, our camp was not so far (about 160km) from where Robert Falcon Scott and his two team members were entombed more than a century ago during their return from the South Pole. Their bodies are now making their way down through the ice and out to the coast.

What the future might hold
If the ocean beneath the ice warms, what does this mean for the Ross Ice Shelf, the massive ice sheet that it holds back, and future sea level? We took detailed temperature and salinity data to understand how the ocean circulates within the cavity. We can use this data to test and improve computer simulations and to assess if the underside of the ice is melting or actually refreezing and growing.
Our new data indicate an ocean warming compared to the measurements taken during the 1970s, especially deeper down. As well as this, the ocean has become less salty. Both are in keeping with what we know about the open oceans around Antarctica.
We also discovered that the underside of the ice was rather more complex than we thought. It was covered in ice crystals – something we see in sea ice near ice shelves. But there was not a massive layer of crystals as seen in the smaller, but very thick, Amery Ice Shelf.
Instead the underside of the ice held clear signatures of sediment, likely incorporated into the ice as the glaciers forming the shelf separated from the coast centuries earlier. The ice crystals must be temporary.
None of this is included in present models of the climate system. Neither the effect of the warm, saline water draining into the cavity, nor the very cold surface waters flowing out, the ice crystals affecting heat transfer to the ice, or the ocean mixing at the ice fronts.
It is not clear if these hidden waters play a significant role in how the world’s oceans work, but it is certain that they affect the ice shelf above. The longevity of ice shelves and their buttressing of Antarctica’s massive ice sheets is of paramount concern.

Links

• Antarctic glacier's unstable past reveals danger of future melting
• Record high to record low: what on earth is happening to Antarctica’s sea ice?
• Don’t worry about the huge Antarctic iceberg – worry about the glaciers behind it
• Shrinking of Antarctic ice shelves is accelerating
• Tipping point: how we predict when Antarctica’s melting ice sheets will flood the seas

Natural Gas Killed Coal – Now Renewables And Batteries Are Taking Over

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

To avoid dangerous climate change, we can’t rely on natural gas replacing coal

Over the past decade, coal has been increasingly replaced by cheaper, cleaner energy sources. US coal power production has dropped by 44% (866 terawatt-hours [TWh]). It’s been replaced by natural gas (up 45%, or 400 TWh), renewables (up 260%, or 200 TWh), and increased efficiency (the US uses 9%, or 371 TWh less electricity than a decade ago).

Evolution of the American power grid mix since 1960. Illustration: Carbon Brief

In other words, of the 866 TWh of lost coal power production, 46% was picked up by natural gas, 43% by increased efficiency, and 23% by renewables.

Natural gas is an unstable ‘bridge fuel’
While the shift away from coal is a positive development in slowing global warming by cutting carbon pollution, as Joe Romm has detailed for Climate Progress, research indicates that shifting to natural gas squanders most of those gains. For example, a 2014 study published in Environmental Research Letters found that when natural gas production is abundant, it crowds out both coal and renewables, resulting in little if any climate benefit. Part of the problem is significant methane leakage from natural gas drilling.

...abundant gas consistently results in both less coal and renewable energy use […] the quantity of methane leaked may ultimately determine whether the overall effect is to slightly reduce or actually increase cumulative emissions […] only climate policies bring about a significant reduction in future emissions from US electricity generation … We conclude that increased natural gas use for electricity will not substantially reduce US GHG emissions, and by delaying deployment of renewable energy technologies, may actually exacerbate the climate change problem in the long term.

Similarly, another 2014 study found that based on the latest estimates of methane leakage rates from natural gas drilling, replacing coal with natural gas provides little in the way of climate benefits. Though it’s been touted as a ‘bridge fuel’ to span the gap between coal and renewables, this research suggests natural gas isn’t significantly better than coal in terms of global warming effects, and thus may not be suitable for that purpose. The ‘bridge’ doesn’t appear to achieve its goal of steadily cutting our greenhouse gas emissions.

Renewables and batteries are starting to beat natural gas

California has been a national leader in clean energy. The state generates very little of its electricity from coal, but natural gas does supply more than a third of the state’s power. A quarter is generated by renewable sources like wind, solar, and geothermal plants, and another 10% comes from hydroelectric dams, on average. In 2017, renewables’ share increased by about 10%, displacing natural gas in the process.

In fact, California has an excess of natural gas power generation capabilities. Some natural gas plants are still essential for ensuring local grid reliability, but in many cases, clean energy resources like a combination of solar and storage can meet reliability needs.
In one recent example, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ordered Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to procure energy storage (batteries) or “preferred resources” (renewables or increased efficiency and conservation) to meet a local reliability need in northern California. The order stemmed from an issue with a “peaker” natural gas plant (so-called because they switch on to meet high, peak electricity demand) operated in northern California. The operator (Calpine) was concerned that the plant was no longer economical, because it’s too infrequently used due largely to an abundance of renewable power. The contract they could receive for providing generation capacity to ensure grid reliability would not be high enough to cover costs to maintain the plant.
Instead of bidding their plant into the program overseen by the CPUC to ensure local reliability, Calpine went directly to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) and requested a “reliability must-run resource” contract, which is a much higher payment than they would have received through the CPUC program. CPUC decided instead to require PG&E to fill the local reliability need with cleaner alternatives. The costs of renewable energy and battery storage have fallen so fast that the clean alternatives might now be cheaper than gas.
In another example, a proposed natural gas peaker plant in Oxnard, California was rejected when it was shown that the CAISO was using outdated battery storage costs from 2014. Given how quickly those prices have fallen, they could now potentially be competitive with natural gas peaker costs.
The redundancy and potential replacement of natural gas with cleaner alternatives extends far beyond these examples. Most electrical service providers in California are now required to develop integrated resource plans. These are electric grid planning documents that outline how the utilities will meet a number of California’s goals, including a 40% reduction in carbon pollution below 1990 levels and 50% electricity production from renewable sources by 2030. Meeting these goals will require replacing non-critical natural gas plants with renewable power.
And California is already installing battery storage systems at record pace. Tesla, AES Energy Storage, and Greensmith Energy Partners have all installed large battery storage facilities in California within the past year. Within 4 years, batteries are projected to be as cheap as natural gas “peakers,” and consistently cheaper with 10 years.

We need a fast transition
It’s important to bear in mind that power plants built today can continue to operate for decades to come. The decisions we make for today’s grid are long-lasting. That’s why there are similar pushes from groups in Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, North Carolina, and South Carolina for utilities to scrap plans for new natural gas plants and instead consider cleaner and potentially cheaper renewable alternatives. Renewables also don’t face the uncertainty associated with fluctuating natural gas prices.
Of course, were there a national price on carbon pollution, renewables and battery storage would win in the marketplace even sooner. As it stands, natural gas prices don’t reflect the costs that we incur from the climate change caused by their greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, as Union of Concerned Scientists senior energy analyst Laura Wisland put it,

Fortunately, rapidly falling costs are already making renewables and battery storage cost-competitive with natural gas, and cheaper than coal. If we’re going to succeed in avoiding the most dangerous climate change consequences, that transition away from all fossil fuels and towards clean energy can’t happen soon enough.

Links

• The war on coal is over. Coal lost
• NASA just made a stunning discovery about how fracking fuels global warming
• By The Time Natural Gas Has A Net Climate Benefit You’ll Likely Be Dead And The Climate Ruined
• California electricity mix in 2017 has involved more renewables, less natural gas
• In Colorado, a glimpse of renewable energy’s insanely cheap future
• Have We Reached Peak Peaker? ‘I Can’t See Why We Should Build a Gas Peaker After 2025’

Plunging Costs Make Solar, Wind And Battery Storage Cheaper Than Coal

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson

The plunging cost of storage, along with that of wind and solar power, appears to have crossed a new threshold after a tender conducted by a major US energy utility suggests “firm and dispatchable” renewables are now cheaper than existing coal plants.
The stunning revelation came from Xcel Energy in Colorado, and quietly released over the Christmas/New Year break, although some outlets like Vox and Carbon Tracker were quick to pick up on the significance.
Last year, XCel Energy put out a “request for proposals” (RFP) for how it could replace two coal-fired generators that it is considering shutting down – part of a plan that will take its share of renewables to more than 50 per cent.
The results were described by Vox’s David Roberts as “mind-blowing”. And he’s not wrong.

The median bid price for projects proposing a mix of wind plus battery storage was just $US21/MWh ($A25.80/MWh), while the median price for solar plus battery storage projects was just $US36/MWh ($A44.30/MWh).
(The graph above comes from the XCel documents. The areas blacked out were done by the utility for reasons of commercial in confidence).
And these prices do not represent just a few one-off, left field offers. All told, there were more than 100 bids combining wind and solar, or both, with battery storage, and 20 gigawatts of such capacity.
The “median” means that half the bids were cheaper than the median price cited above.
According to Carbon Tracker, these are the lowest renewables plus battery storage bids in the US to date, and most likely anywhere in the world.
“The median bid for wind plus storage appears to be lower than the operating cost of all coal plants currently in Colorado, while the median solar plus storage bid could be lower than 74 per cent of operating coal capacity,” it noted in a report earlier this month.
(See graph below. This shows that the operating cost of the cheapest coal plants in Colorado is just below $US40/MWh, rising to more than $40/MWh and then soaring beyond $100/MWh for the most expensive units)

The significance of the tender result is the small additional cost of storage – between $US3 and $US7/MWh. This is less than half the $US15/MWh priced in the previous lowest bid – $US45/MWh for solar and storage in a bid accepted by Tucson Energy easier last year.
The cost of wind without storage was $18/MWh, while the cost of solar without storage was $29/MWh – both prices benefit from federal tax incentives, and would likely be around $US25/MWh and $US40/MWh without them.
The significance for Australia is enormous. The battery storage sector has only just commenced, but the potential is clearly huge.
The success of the Tesla big battery in South Australia since its launch in early December has created great interest, and caused many to think how the operations of the electricity grid may be completely rethought and redesigned.
The Tesla big battery will be joined by numerous other battery storage installations in a relatively short time – smaller battery arrays in Alice Springs and near Cooktown in Queensland are due to come on soon, as will another battery at the Wattle Point wind farm in South Australia.
This will be followed by three new battery storage arrays in Victoria, another in the Northern Territory, at least two more in South Australia (Lincoln Gap and Whyalla) and numerous other potential projects in Queensland and NSW.
It was interesting that Franck Woitiez, the head of Neoen Australia which operates the Tesla big battery adjacent to its Hornsdale wind farm, last week spoke of the huge pipeline of solar projects in NSW – more than 2,000MW – that could readily adopt battery storage.
Woitiez noted how quickly the 150MW Coleambally solar project in western NSW will be delivered – less than two years after the project was first conceived – and said large scale solar and storage could be delivered in half the time, and at a much lower cost, than the massive Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme.
The US tender bears that out. Wind, solar and storage costs in the US tend to be cheaper than in Australia, partly due to the lower cost of finance, the lower cost of labour, and the depth of the industry there.
The Xcel tender results are just part of story that illustrates the plunging cost of wind, solar, and battery storage. Bids of below $US20/MWh for solar projects have now been delivered in both Saudi Arabia and Mexico, and storage is matching predictions that its cost profile will be similar to solar.

The Xcel tender elicited bids for stand alone battery storage with a media price of $US11/MWh, with storage ranging from
As Vox’s Roberts notes, a company called ViZn Energy Systems, which uses flow batteries rather than lithium-ion, is promising $US27/MWh solar+storage by 2023.
That is lower than many predictions for solar alone. When the Tucson bid results were announced, it was considered to be a death knell for the market for new gas plants.
As Danny Kennedy, formerly on Sungevity and now head of the California Clean Energy Fund, has noted, both GE and Siemens have taken an axe to their once enormous gas generation units because of the massive slump in orders because renewables and storage are beating out gas plant in tenders.
Now that the cost of wind or solar plus storage is beating out existing coal, that takes the market transition to a whole new dimension.

Links

• In Colorado, a glimpse of renewable energy’s insanely cheap future
• Colorado’s renewables revolution gathers steam
• Tesla big battery moves from show-boating to money-making
• Neoen starts on 150MW solar plant in NSW – just a year from initial “idea”

Biomining The Elements Of The Future

The Conversation - Marcos Voutsinos

Joey Kyber/Pixels, CC BY-SA

Biomining is the kind of technique promised by science fiction: a vast tank filled with microorganisms that leach metal from ore, old mobile phones and hard drives.
It sounds futuristic, but it’s currently used to produce about 5% of the world’s gold and 20% of the world’s copper. It’s also used to a lesser extent to extract nickel, zinc, cobalt and rare earth elements. But perhaps it’s most exciting potential is extracting rare earth elements, which are crucial in everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology.
The Mary Kathleen mine, an exhausted uranium mine in northwest Queensland, contains an estimated A$4 billion in rare earth elements. Biomining offers a cost-effective and environmentally friendly option for getting it out.
Biomining is so versatile that it can be used on other planetary bodies. Bioleaching studies on the international space station have shown microorganisms from extreme environments on Earth can leach a large variety of important minerals and metals from rocks when exposed to the cold, heat, radiation and vacuum of space.
Some scientists even believe we cannot colonise other planets without the help of biomining technologies.

How does it work?

Microorgaisms in tanks leach the minerals from any source material. Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Biomining takes place within large, closed, stirred-tank reactors (bioreactors). These devices generally contain water, microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, or fungi), ore material, and a source of energy for the microbes.
The source of energy required depends on the specific microbe necessary for the job. For example, gold and copper are biologically “leached” from sulfidic ores using microorganisms that can derive energy from inorganic sources, via the oxidation of sulfur and iron.
However, rare earth elements are bioleached from non-sulfidic ores using microorganisms that require an organic carbon source, because these ores do not contain a usable energy source. In this case, sugars are added to allow the microbes to grow.
All living organisms need metals to carry out basic enzyme reactions. Humans get their metals from the trace concentrations in their food. Microbes, however, obtain metals by dissolving them from the minerals in their environment. They do this by producing organic acids and metal-binding compounds. Scientists exploit these traits by mixing microbes in solution with ores and collecting the metal as it floats to the top.
The temperature, sugars, the rate at which the tank is stirred, acidity, carbon dioxide and oxygen levels all need to be monitored and fine-tuned to provide optimal working conditions.

The benefits of biomining
Traditional mining methods require harsh chemicals, lots of energy and produce many pollutants. In contrast, biomining uses little energy and produces few microbial by-products such as organic acids and gases.
Because it’s cheap and simple, biomining can effectively exploit low grade sources of metals (such as mine tailings) that would otherwise be uneconomical using traditional methods.
Countries are increasingly turning to biomining such as Finland, Chile and Uganda. Chile has exhausted much of its copper rich ores and now utilises biomining, while Uganda has been extracting cobalt from copper mine tailings for over a decade.

Why do we need rare earth elements?
The rare earth elements include the group of 15 lanthanides near the bottom of the periodic table, plus scandium and yttrium. They are widely used in just about all electronics and are increasingly sought after by the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries.
The unique atomic properties of these elements make them useful as magnets and phosphors. They’re used as strong lightweight magnets in electric vehicles, wind turbines, hard disc drives, medical equipment and as phosphors in energy efficiency lighting and in the LEDs of mobile phones, televisions and laptops.
Despite their name, rare earth elements are not rare and some are in fact more abundant than copper, nickel and lead in the Earth’s crust. However, unlike these primary metals which form ores (a naturally occurring mineral or rock from which a useful substance can be easily extracted), rare earth elements are widely dispersed. Thus to be economically feasible they are generally mined as secondary products alongside primary metals such as iron and copper.
Over 90% of the world’s rare earth elements come from China where production monopolies, trade restrictions and illegal mining have caused prices to fluctuate dramatically over the years.

Most renewable energy technologies depend on rare earth metals. Pixabay

Reports from the US Department of Energy, European Union, and the US intelligence commission have labelled several rare earth elements as critical materials, based on their importance to clean energy, high supply risk, and lack of substitutes.
These reports encourage research and development into alternative mining methods such as biomining as a potential mitigation strategy.
Heeding these calls, laboratories in Curtin, and Berkeley Universities have used microorganisms to dissolve common rare-earth-element-bearing minerals. These pilot scale studies have shown promising results, with extraction rates growing closer to those of conventional mining methods.
Because most electronics have a notoriously short lifespan and poor recyclability, laboratories are experimenting with “urban” biomining. For example, bioleaching studies have seen success in extracting rare earth elements from the phosphor powder lining fluorescent globes, and the use of microorganisms to recycle rare earth elements from electronic wastes such as hard drive magnets.
The rare earth elements are critical for the future of our technology. Biomining offers a way to obtain these valuable resources in a way that is both environmentally sustainable and economically feasible.

Links

• Will rare earth elements power our clean energy future?
• Politically charged: do you know where your batteries come from?
• Curious Kids: How do scientists work out how old the Earth is?

CEFC Finances Solar Farm At Coleambally In NSW

Climate Leadership Report

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has committed $30 million in debt finance to the 150MW (AC) Coleambally Solar Farm being developed by Neoen Australia. The solar farm will be the largest in NSW.
The Coleambally Solar Farm is five kilometres north east of Coleambally, and 70 kilometres south of Griffith.
It will consist of about 565,000 solar panels on 550 hectares and is expected to generate enough electricity to power more than 50,000 homes, while abating about 300,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.
The project has contracted 70 per cent of its output to EnergyAustralia.
The Coleambally site was chosen after a feasibility assessment confirmed there was an abundant solar resource at the location, which also has an existing electricity substation with grid connection capacity.
Up to 300 workers are likely to be employed during the construction phase, which is expected to take around nine months.

Neoen's Parkes Solar Farm

During the past 12 months, the CEFC has worked with developer Neoen Australia to accelerate large-scale solar capacity in regional NSW, providing debt finance for four projects that will deliver an additional 260MW (AC) of renewable energy capacity.
The CEFC has provided $150 million in debt finance to Neoen solar farm developments in Dubbo, Griffith and Parkes.
The Griffith and Parkes solar farm projects are now fully built and are undergoing commissioning, exporting increasing amount of renewable electricity into the national electricity grid as commissioning progresses.
Full-scale commercial operation is expected before the end of February.

Links

• Coleambally Solar Farm
• Largest Solar Farm in NSW to be built in Coleambally
• EnergyAustralia signs PPA for 150MW Neoen solar farm in NSW
• Coly solar farm set to power 50,000 homes