Endangered China monkeys double in number

UPI 6 Sep 08;

GUIYANG, China, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- The number of endangered gray snub-nosed monkeys, found only in China's Guizhou province, has more than doubled to about 850, a government bureau says.

The population, which lives in Guizhou's 260-square-mile mountainous Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, has grown because of steady environmental improvements and governmental protection measures, the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve Administration Bureau said.

Back in 1979, there were just 400 gray snub-nosed simians, the bureau noted in a report carried by Xinua, China's official news agency.

The reserve, seeking to end more than a century of mining that depleted the forest on the mountains' northern slope, was established in 1978.

The monkey, on China's list of most-endangered wild animals, is the rarest among the three species of golden monkeys in China.

Since 1992, the bureau has successfully bred 16 of the monkeys, also known as Guizhou golden hair monkeys or gray golden hair monkeys, from seven captured in the wild, Xinhua reported.

The monkeys get their name from the short, stump of a nose on their round face, with nostrils arranged forward.

Primarily tree-dwellers, they inhabit mountain forests up to an altitude of two to three miles, in the winter moving into the deeply secluded regions.

Rare monkeys double in number in China but remain under threat
mongabay.com 8 Sep 08;

China's population of the gray snub-nosed monkey, a critically-endangered species endemic to Guizhou Province in southwestern China, has more than doubled in the wild since conservation measures were implemented in 1979, reports Chinese state media.

The primate is the among country's most endangered species — even rarer than the better-known panda — with a population of around 850 according to the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve Administration Bureau, which manages the 260-square-mile (670-square-kilometer) reserve where the bulk of individuals are found. The population has increased from about 400 in 1979. The species, which is also known as Guizhou golden hair monkey, was under threat from poaching and habitat loss caused by mining and logging. Efforts to breed the monkey in captivity have met little success — only 16 have been bred since 1992.

The species — like two closely related species of golden monkey in China — inhabits high-altitude evergreen forests at elevations from 3,000 to 4,500 meters (9,800 to 14,800 feet), where temperatures may fall below freezing for several months in a row.

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Found after 300m years: rainforest fossils show how climate change could look

Lewis Smith, Environment Reporter
Times Online 8 Sep 08;

A series of fossilised forests the size of small cities have provided prehistoric evidence of how tropical rainforests are destroyed by global warming.

The fossil remains represent the first rainforests grown on the planet and their demise more than 300 million years ago “points to the future” of the modern-day Amazon.

Six petrified forests, dating from 303.9 million to 309 million years ago, have been discovered in coalmines in the United States. Because they straddle a period of intense global warming researchers have been able to see the effects of climate change on an ancient landscape.

One forest that stretched 10,000 hectares (100 sq km) is the largest fossil forest yet found, dwarfing a 1,000ha forest that was announced last year as the biggest.
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Howard Falcon-Lang, of the University of Bristol, said that the forests were frozen in time and show changes in the tree cover before and after the global warming began.

Fossils reveal that the landscape now deep beneath Illinois and Kentucky was covered in huge club moss trees, horsetails and ferns 309 million years ago. Once global warming had taken place 306.5 million years ago, the landscape altered enormously and the trees were replaced with “weedy ferns”.

“These are the remains of the first rainforests to evolve on our planet,” Dr Falcon-Lang said at the British Association yesterday. “They had lush rainforest vegetation, not dissimilar to the Amazonian rainforest. These are the largest fossil forests in the world. It's quite extraordinary to find a forest landscape preserved for miles.”

The forests were buried during earthquakes and the vegetation was swiftly preserved as the sea rushed in and buried it under sediment. Proof of their existence can now be seen in more than 50 mines where the coal seams have been dug out.

Walking along the mine tunnels was an extraordinary experience, Dr Falcon-Lang said: “The coal represents the soil on which this rainforest was growing. The trees are on the roof. You can see roots hanging down.”

He said it appeared that the huge trees suffered enormous stress and died out when faced by global warming. “We are beginning to show there appears to be a threshold in ancient rainforest systems beyond which the whole system begins to unravel quite quickly,” he said.

“The rainforest dramatically collapses during this period of warming. This was very, very extreme global warming. Giant club moss trees vanished overnight to be replaced by rather weedy fern vegetation. All this points to the fate of the Amazon.”

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EU Looks at 2009 Quota Cuts for Baltic Cod, Salmon

PlanetArk 9 Sep 08;

BRUSSELS - Fishermen in the Baltic Sea will have to cut their catches next year if overtrawled species like cod, herring and salmon are to stand a chance of survival in those waters, the European Commission said on Monday.

For nearly all species that are subject to annual quotas, the Commission recommends cutting 2009 catches by 15 percent from this year. But for one, cod in the eastern Baltic, it says fish numbers have recovered enough for a 15 percent quota rise.

Last year, scientists advised that eastern Baltic cod had been overfished to the point where it might vanish from the area, and recommended an outright fishing ban.

After a lot of haggling, EU ministers managed to set a quota cut of 6 percent for 2008 but offset that concession by agreeing that vessels would have to tie up at ports for longer periods.

"When the recovery plan for Baltic cod was put in place last year, scientists were warning that the eastern cod stock was on the verge of collapse," EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg said.

EU fish recovery plans normally combine management of catch volumes with restrictions in the number of days that vessels may spend at sea trawling for fish, spread over several years.

"By applying that plan, we have been able to turn this situation around, and that stock is beginning to grow again. This is a very encouraging sign," Borg said in a statement.

Catches of salmon, sprat and plaice in Baltic waters should be cut by 15 percent from this year, the Commission said.

Scientists warn that salmon has become a concern in Baltic waters due to a very low survival rate of young fish, meaning that adult salmon numbers may decline in the next few years.

Herring was also a problem, especially the stock in the western Baltic where fish intermingle with already depleted numbers of herring in the North Sea, it said, proposing a massive quota reduction of 63 percent for next year.

EU fisheries ministers will discuss the Commission's quota proposals at their next meeting in October in Luxembourg. (Reporting by Jeremy Smith; Editing by Catherine Evans)

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Why the West should put money in the trees

Bharrat Jagdeo, BBC Green Room 8 Sep 08;

In 2006, Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo outlined an offer to place almost the entirety of Guyana's rainforest under international supervision as part of the world's battle against climate change. In the Green Room this week, President Jagdeo sets out his views on how to reduce the 18% of greenhouse gas emissions caused by tropical deforestation.

Imagine a business which invested 80% of its profits in products with the lowest rate of return.

Is this business destined to succeed? Unlikely.

Yet global efforts to combat climate change bear a worrying similarity.

The Kyoto Protocol has resulted in the emergence of a more than US$60bn (£34bn) carbon market as the world's main mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a welcome start. But about 80% of this money goes to countries which cause less than 20% of emissions.

We will fail future generations unless we address this lack of proportionality.

In early December, we will have a chance to do this when representatives of almost 200 countries gather in Poznan, Poland to continue forging an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

As a rainforest country, securing a proportionate response to tropical deforestation is of particular importance to Guyana.

Tropical deforestation contributes about 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That is about the same as the total emissions from the US, and more than the entire global transportation sector.

Yet under the Kyoto Protocol, it remains more valuable to cut forests down than to leave them standing.

Economic question

If we are to solve this problem, we need to first accept a fundamental point.

Legal deforestation takes place because forest communities and countries can earn money and create jobs by selling trees and clearing land for agriculture.

These are legitimate objectives for citizens and governments to pursue - particularly because most rainforest countries are among the poorest in the world.

By contrast, the global economy does not value the services that forests provide when trees are kept alive, including the avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions.

Correcting this market failure will require recognising that protecting rainforests is not only an environmental concern but an economic issue that cuts to the core of a nation's development.

It therefore needs sustained attention from the highest levels of governments.

Partners in progress

I was my country's minister of finance when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, and I paid very little attention to it.

This was a mistake; and I advise today's ministers of finance, prime ministers and presidents to ensure that they give climate change and deforestation a greater priority than I did.

As well as national leadership, we need international partnership. No country can go it alone.

We need the active involvement of governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations and conscientious people everywhere, to advocate for action and to devise realistic solutions.

In Guyana, we are ready to play our part, and to provide a model for other rainforest countries to share.

Our deforestation rate is one of the lowest in the world and we want it to stay that way.

However, we also face considerable development challenges. We need better schools and hospitals, more jobs and economic opportunities, and to meet all the other economic and social demands of Guyana's people.

Poverty indicator

I frequently receive proposals from investors to convert our forest into land for agriculture or biofuels.

Agreeing to these would be a quick way to meet the development challenges we face.

But in Guyana, we are acutely conscious of climate change.

Most of our population and productive land are below sea level and suffering from changing weather patterns.

In 2005, floods caused economic damage equivalent to 60% of our GDP.

We recognise that as a nation where over 80% of our surface area is tropical rainforest, we have an obligation to our own people and the wider world to seek to preserve it.

This is why in 2006, I suggested that the UK and Guyana could work together to identify bold rainforest solutions that could be used as models for the world.

For our part, we are willing to place almost our entire rainforest - which is larger than England - under internationally verified supervision if the right economic incentives are created.

This does not mean sacrificing sovereignty over our forest or restricting the development aspirations of our people. It simply means allowing globally recognised supervision to verify that activities within the forest are sustainable.

At the UN climate meeting in Poznan, I will be outlining our vision in greater detail, and I hope that many British people will support our efforts.

This hope stems from my experience at the 1998 meeting of the G8 in Birmingham, when I joined British NGOs to lobby for debt relief.

Thanks to the efforts of these NGOs and thousands of individuals from across the UK, the British government took the global lead on securing debt relief for countries such as mine.

This has transformed the lives and livelihoods of millions.

With climate change and deforestation, the prize is greater still.

I hope that the months and years ahead will see us renew our partnership.

And I believe that this can be our contribution to winning the battle against our generation's defining challenge.

Bharrat Jagdeo is President of Guyana

UK readers can hear more about Mr Jagdeo's proposals on rainforest protection, and debate and discussion of the issues involved, in this week's edition of Panorama , broadcast on BBC One at 2030 BST

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website

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Arctic shipping set to explode in legal vacuum, experts warn

Yahoo News 9 Sep 08;

As the Arctic ice cap melts away, shipping in the environmentally fragile region is expected to balloon, but there is virtually no legal framework to regulate the new activity, experts cautioned Monday.

"The problem is that the ice is going to recede and we are going to see an increase in the economic activity in this area ... There is going to be a huge expansion of shipping," said Tatiana Saksina of the WWF's International Arctic Programme.

When the Northwest Passage becomes free of ice in the summer months, something scientists say could happen in a matter of years, "there will be an invasion of alien species, we're going to see over-fishing, we're going to see an expansion of petroleum development ... Far stricter rules are needed," she told AFP.

Saksina is one of around 40 legal experts gathered at the University of Akureyri in northern Iceland for a three-day conference aimed at staking out a new legal framework for the fragile and changing polar regions.

While commercial activities in the Arctic have so far been limited by the region's inaccessibility and its extreme weather conditions, scientists now say it is a question of "when", not "if," the ice cap will vanish during summer.

An ice-free North Pole holds the promise of far shorter shipping routes between Europe and Asia and of making the region's untold wealth of natural resources, including oil and gas, more accessible.

Yet as governments and companies line up to get in on the action, experts warn there are still virtually no laws regulating their activities in a region with one of the world's most fragile ecosystems.

While there are already certain regulations in place, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, David Vanderzwaag of Canada's Dalhousie University points out that they are mainly non-binding general guidelines that do not take into account the specific nature of the Arctic.

"We really are moving into an era where guidelines will no longer be adequate. We need binding requirements," he told AFP.

"We will have more tourism ships going up, eventually more minerals being shipped out of the Arctic, oil and gas being shipped out. All these things are on the horizon, and some are already happening, and the question is, are we prepared?" he asked.

"Globally, there's a considerable amount of pollution that is allowed into the oceans, but the question is, are the global environmental standards adequate for the Arctic? And if there is a problem with a tourism ship up there, are we prepared to deal with that?" he continued.

Saksina agreed, pointing out that "we are already witnessing the expansion of tourism. All these cruise ships in the Arctic obviously put pressure on the marine environment, but first and foremost we see here a danger for human life, because if something happens in these waters there is no mechanism for response."

"It's a quite dangerous situation," she said, stressing that the Arctic Ocean is particularly difficult to navigate due to floating ice blocks and lacking daylight.

"And nobody knows how to clean oil spills on ice. We have no technique to do it now," she said.

Timo Koivurova of the University of Lapland's Arctic Centre in Finland also emphasised the urgency of putting in place a binding legal framework that takes into account the peculiarities of the Arctic, insisting that unbridled, rapid change in the region could lead to catastrophe.

"The problem is that if and when these economic operations enter the area, then it is already too late to put in place any kind of international treaty," he told AFP.

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Hunger in Africa blamed on western rejection of GM food

Ian Sample, The Guardian 8 Sep 08;

The rise of organic farming and rejection of GM crops in Britain and other developed countries is largely to blame for the impoverishment of Africa, according to the government's former chief scientist.

Sir David King, who left the job at the end of last year, says anti-scientific attitudes towards modern agriculture are being exported to Africa and holding back a green revolution that could dramatically improve the continent's food supply.

King, who is due to give the presidential address at the British Association's Festival of Science in Liverpool this evening, will criticise non-governmental organisations and the UN in his speech for backing traditional farming techniques, which he says cannot provide enough food for the continent's growing population.

"The problem is that the western world's move toward organic farming - a lifestyle choice for a community with surplus food - and against agricultural technology in general and GM in particular, has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, with devastating consequences."

Last week, King, who is now director of the Smith school of enterprise and the environment at Oxford University, said genetically modified crops could help Africa mirror the substantial increases in crop production seen in India and China. "What was demonstrated [there] was that modern agricultural technologies can multiply crop production per hectare by factors of seven to 10." But traditional techniques could "not deliver the food for the burgeoning population of Africa".

King said a recent report chaired by Professor Robert Watson, the government's chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was shortsighted. The report concluded that GM crops had only a minor part to play in eradicating world hunger. The research, based on the findings of 400 scientists, noted that food was cheaper and diets better than 40 years ago, but that while enough food was produced to feed the global population, still 800 million people went hungry.

"You cannot argue that Africa has hunger because it doesn't have GM today," said Watson. "We have more food today than ever before but it isn't getting to the right people. It's not a food production problem, it's a rural development problem."

King will also call for a shift in research towards tackling climate change. More effort, he says, is needed on solar power, which could provide enough energy for the world 10,000 times over.

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Garnaut not strong enough on saving Reef

Chris McGrath
couriermail.com.au 9 Sep 08;

AT least Ross Garnaut was honest about the cost to our greatest natural treasure in his recent report on greenhouse gases.

Saying that Australia should initially aim for a global consensus to stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million, he was brutally frank: "The 550 strategy would be expected to lead to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs."

The Australian and Queensland governments have always avoided this point when explaining their climate policies. Neither has ever stated a stabilisation target for the rise in global temperatures or greenhouse gases. To do so would expose them to the criticism that their policies would not save the Great Barrier Reef and a host of other ecosystems.

Garnaut's frank admission reflects the findings of reef scientists who have been warning of the impacts of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef since mass coral bleaching occurred globally in 1998 and 2002.

Rising sea temperatures and increasing acidity of the oceans due to our use of fossil fuels are now well recognised as major threats to coral reefs in coming decades.

Dr Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences in Townsville, reviewed the expected impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef in A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef From Beginning to End.

"We are now facing the inescapable conclusion that the Great Barrier Reef, along with all the other coral reefs in the world, will be diminished beyond anything we have ever considered 'normal' as a direct result of human-induced climate change - and this will happen during the present century," Veron wrote.

Garnaut's frankness is welcome, but his conclusions leave us to wonder whether this is the best we can do. Should we just write off the Great Barrier Reef and the $7 billion it generates annually for the economy? Should we just write off the 66,000 jobs that go with it?

As a boy growing up in the Whitsundays in the 1970s, I did not dream the Great Barrier Reef would be severely damaged by human activity within my lifetime. Much less would I have dreamt that we would choose to allow these impacts to occur. Garnaut's targets are not ambitious enough and we should not accept them.

We should judge our climate-change policies by this simple test: Will we leave the Great Barrier Reef for our children? At present the answer is "no". We are all responsible for changing the answer to "yes".



The current science indicates our target should be stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gases at 350 parts per million, but Garnaut does not even mention this.

We do not know whether we can stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases at 350, 450 or 550ppm, but think of it this way: If we wanted to build a bridge across a 1km-wide river, we would not ask our engineers and scientists to build us a bridge that was 500m long. We should apply the same logic to climate-change policy and set targets that produce the results we want to achieve.

We need vision, ambition and hard work to solve the climate crisis. Garnaut's approach lacks the vision and ambition that is needed. We need to add these ingredients to Australia's many hard workers to solve the climate crisis.

Dr Chris McGrath is a Brisbane barrister specialising in environmental law.

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China Government Adviser Urges Greenhouse Gas Cuts

Chris Buckley, PlanetArk 9 Sep 08;

BEIJING - China should bind itself to international goals to slash greenhouse gas pollution, one of the nation's most prominent policy advisers said, in a striking break with Beijing's official stance.

Hu Angang, a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, warned failure to act could doom global climate change talks.

In submissions to leaders and a recent essay, Hu has argued China could emerge an economic and diplomatic winner if it vows to cut gases from industry, farms and transport that are trapping increasingly dangerous levels of solar heat in the atmosphere.

"It's in China's own interest to accept greenhouse gas emissions goals, not just in the international interest," Hu told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.

"China is a developing country, but it's a very special one, with the biggest population, high energy use and sooner or later, if not now, the biggest total greenhouse gas emissions. So this is a common battlefront we must join."

Hu's arguments are likely to stoke debate about China's stance in accelerating negotiations to forge a global climate pact to build on the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

China has insisted that, as a developing country with relatively low average greenhouse gas output per person, it must grow first and not accept any caps until wealthier. Rich nations that caused most emissions must lead and help more, it says.

But many experts and Western politicians say Beijing must accept measurable limits so other big polluters will also commit.

Hu acknowledged that backing caps was a minority view in China. But the professor, who has helped shape environmental and social policy, said his stance would gain support as the damage from global warming and benefits of binding cuts become clearer.

"I've always started out in the minority but ended up as the mainstream," he said.


CONTRIBUTOR OR VICTIM?

In the scheme recently proposed by Hu in the Chinese-language Journal of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies, China's greenhouse gas pollution would continue rising until around 2020.

The country would then "dramatically" curtail emissions, cutting them by 2030 to the level they were in 1990 and then half that by 2050. China's greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 3.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 1994.

Hu's plan is ambitious for this fast-growing nation of 1.3 billion people. China's emissions of carbon dioxide have raced past the United States', reaching 6.2 billion tonnes in 2006, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has estimated.

But China should commit to cuts in a global pact, even if the United States resists, Hu said. Washington refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, under which China and other poorer nations need not accept emissions limits.

"Like joining the WTO, this should be used as international pressure to spur our own transformation," he added, referring to the World Trade Organisation, which China joined in 2001.

"If China makes a 1 percent error in handling climate change, that could mean 100 percent failure in making agreement."

Bold reductions will need infusions of pollution-reducing technology from advanced economies. But by accepting them, China would win diplomatically and economically by rising as "green" power and a massive market for energy innovation, Hu said.

An economist often quoted in official media, Hu said he submitted his climate proposals to President Hu Jintao, no relative, earlier this year.

China and other poor countries with many farmers would suffer most from rising sea levels, worsening droughts and erratic rainfall triggered by global warming, said Hu Angang.

"Unless we become one of the biggest green contributors, we will be one of the biggest victims of global warming," he said. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)

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Puget Sound geoduck farming may harm marine life

The Seattle Times 6 Sep 08;

Raising geoducks may endanger inland marine life and tidelands, Pierce County planners say, a finding that could likely complicate the county's permit process for farming the ugly but lucrative giant clams.
TACOMA, Wash. —

Raising geoducks may endanger inland marine life and tidelands, Pierce County planners say, a finding that could likely complicate the county's permit process for farming the ugly but lucrative giant clams.

Highlights of the decision were provided in an e-mail Wednesday to County Council member Terry Lee, who had inquired about the status of a permit application. The News Tribune found the correspondence Thursday during a review of geoduck (GOO'-ee-duck) permit records.

Kathleen Larrabee, a county Planning and Land Services Department supervisor who drafted the decision, told the newspaper that notices were sent within the past week to two permit applicants. One, Taylor Shellfish Farms, the West Coast's largest geoduck grower, is fighting efforts to close the harvest at its geoduck farm on Case Inlet.

Similar letters probably will be sent to six other permit applications later, Larrabee said.

"If that applies to one geoduck farm, it has to apply to each geoduck farm," she said.

Growers may then drop their applications or modify their plans, issue an environmental report on how they would deal with the planners' concerns or offer scientific evidence to dispute the county's assessment.

"This shows a lot of wisdom on Pierce County's part despite the legal challenge the industry has promised," said Laura Hendricks of the Gig Harbor area, a spokeswoman for the Coalition to Protect Puget Sound Habitat.

For more than a year, the coalition has sought a county requirement for a full environmental review before any new geoduck farms are authorized. The group contends that intensive shellfish farming harms shorelines, fish and wildlife.

"We are pleased to see the process moving forward and the issues getting more defined," Taylor spokesman Bill Dewey said, explaining that his company will offer scientific research to meet the county's concerns.

"There's actually been a fair amount of work done," Dewey said. "We'll just have to wait and see how it comes out."."

A dispute over Taylor's geoduck farm northwest of Joemma Beach State Park resumes Monday in Thurston County Superior Court in Olympia. The coalition has asked a judge to overturn a Pierce County decision that allows Taylor to harvest clams despite expiration of a permit.

Most geoduck farming operations cover beaches with thousands of plastic tubes and yards of netting to protect baby clams from predators.

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Best of our wild blogs: 8 Sep 08

Shell on Pulau Bukom
what goes on there? on the wild shores of singapore blog

Spotted Wood Owl spotted
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Ducks of Oz
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Don't step on the little red nose shrimps
on the wild shores of singapore blog

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Shell 'shuts Singapore refinery unit due to technical faults'

Straits Times 8 Sep 08;

ROYAL Dutch Shell shut down its 115,000 to 130,000 barrels per day (bpd) No. 4 crude distillation unit (CDU) in Singapore on Friday due to technical problems, a source at the refinery said.

'It would take about a week or so to fix the problem,' the source told Reuters on Saturday.

Shell's Bukom refining complex has a total capacity of 500,000 bpd, and has two other CDUs which are running at around a 90 per cent rate.

The No. 4 CDU, the complex's second-largest, was running at reduced rates of 70 to 80 per cent, or 90,000 bpd, since its restart from maintenance last month, in part due to weak margins, a refinery source had said earlier this week.

It normally runs at a 90 per cent rate of around 105,000 to 110,000 bpd, the source had said.

A Shell spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment. The refiner does not normally comment on operational matters.

Last month, some oil refiners in Asia cut or were planning to cut crude processing rates, following similar moves by Western peers, as high fuel prices hit demand and pressured margins.

The margins have only started to recover recently as crude prices eased, with the five-day average for complex margins in the Singapore refining centre standing at US$6.67 a barrel versus US$4.92 in the last 15 days. The August average was US$4.06 a barrel, the lowest monthly average seen so far this year, compared with April's US$10.13, the highest so far this year.

REUTERS

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All systems go for open gas market here from next Monday

Source says market players tested IT system thoroughly
Ronnie Lim, Business Times 8 Sep 08;

(SINGAPORE) Sept 15 - this is when Singapore will liberalise or completely free up its gas market.

This means that all natural gas - whether piped from Malaysia and Indonesia or shipped via LNG tankers from elsewhere - will be intermingled and transported via a PowerGas-owned and managed inland gas pipeline network to all end-users such as power stations and petrochemical plants here.

'Everything has been tested and it's all systems go for a Sept 15 launch,' a source told BT, adding that there may still be a bit more fine-tuning even then - after players' feedback of the Gas Transportation System Solution (GTSS) or IT operating system developed by Singapore Power subsidiary PowerGas.

Market authorities such as regulator Energy Market Authority (EMA) want to ensure a 'bug-free' GTSS from Day 1 - which meant comprehensive and exhaustive testing of the IT system with all the market players involved - and that was a reason why the gas market opening was postponed from the earlier July 1 target to the mid-September date.

Liberalisation of the gas market - following that of the electricity market in January 2003 - is important as natural gas accounts for over 80 per cent of electricity-generating feedstock. Open competition in gas supplies is aimed at keeping prices down.

Under a liberalised gas market there will be licensed gas 'shippers' including Gas Supply Pte Ltd and Sembcorp (both Indonesian gas buyers), Keppel Corp and Senoko Power (which buy Malaysian gas) and PowerSeraya, which wants to be a gas trader as part of its plans to be an integrated energy player.

But there will only be one 'transporter', PowerGas, which is in charge of the inland gas pipeline grid.

There will also be 'importers' - which includes some of the shippers - which deal directly with the gas producers to source for the gas. UK's BG Group, appointed the aggregator or sole buyer of liquefied natural gas for Singapore earlier this year, will be one such importer.

Ahead of the Sept 15 market launch, SembCorp Gas is expected to have transferred its onshore gas pipeline assets to PowerGas and have been compensated for exiting the gas transportation business.

Field trials for the GTSS started in early June, which was also the time when PowerGas advertised for personnel to administer and manage the gas market operations, as well as technical officers and technicians to maintain the system.

To prepare for the market opening, the government also implemented an amended Gas Act in February which facilitates open, competitive access for gas importers and retailers to Singapore's pipeline grid and the upcoming LNG terminal.

Despite the impending gas market opening this month, one player still left out in the cold is Island Power.

Island has had to suspend its $1 billion power station project on Jurong Island as it has been unable to bring in its own Indonesian gas supplies because of legal pipeline tangles involving incumbent Singapore players.

It had filed an application to the EMA last year to help it resolve this and gain access to the pipeline.

Last month, an EMA spokeswoman told BT that while 'the Gas Network Code (or market opening here) will give Island Power access to the onshore pipelines, the work to open access to the offshore pipelines for Island Power is still in progress'.

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