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Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid Risking Blackout: Energy

Study: East Africa pirates made over $400m

Making Everything Shipshape

The ports in Tacoma, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach and elsewhere offer much shorter sailing times than Gulf Coast and East Coast ports. But for shippers of some goods, the web of logistics, including trucks and railroads, ends up being less expensive if they go through the Panama Canal.

While the widened Panama Canal will allow an all-water route for big ships to the East Coast, the project — originally scheduled to open this year — has been plagued with construction delays. And the authorities have yet to announce toll charges for passing ships. In the end, it might be too expensive for some ships to use.

The eurozone has been at the epicenter of this contractionary force on global growth. Since eurozone countries trade extensively with each other and the rest of the world, their slowdowns have contributed significantly to a decrease in global trade, in turn undermining global growth. In particular, as European imports from East Asia have fallen, East Asian economies’ growth is down sharply from last year and the 2010 forecast – and, predictably, growth in their imports from the rest of the world has lost momentum.

Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise dating techniques have revealed.

The excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and 6,000 years old, respectively

Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period of time.

Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.

Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon

Besides, he added, costs and fees can shift; Panama can be expected to raise rates for canal passage, and “the railroads are not going to sit idly by” and let the water route undercut their business.

After Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi trumpeted plans for a “port of the future” at Gulfport with a 50-foot-deep channel, redirecting some $600 million in federal housing disaster funds on a project he pledged would spur the economy and create bountiful jobs.

Instead of basking in the reflected glory of a prize winner funded by European grants, she said she had to listen to a speech attacking the red-tape and bureaucracy - and "generally embarrassing the hell out of me".

Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe, explained what was profoundly different about these new digital industries - that they expand at a speed and scale that would have been impossible in the traditional manufacturing industries. Governments trying to respond to such quicksilver businesses needed to ensure that young people were well-educated, creative and adaptable, he said.

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

The average cost of Tunisia's external debt is nearly 4%, and is mainly denominated in euros and US dollars.

Today, Tunisia’s situation under the troika comes down to the fact that the country is borrowing to consume and not to invest.

Another fact that will render paying off the debt more difficult is that the redeemable portion of the foreign debt within 10 to 20 years or more is 81.3 % of all loans taken from abroad.

Germany’s decision to eliminate its nuclear plants led it to bring coal-fired power plants out of mothballs to make up the difference. Doing so was a viable option because coal demand in the United States has dropped sharply as American power plants have turned to less expensive gas, driving down the cost of American coal for export to global markets.

As a result, carbon dioxide emissions in Germany went up last year, not down

“Without shale gas, this would be a world where Russia would have very, very strong market power and there would be very strong dependency on gas supply from geopolitically risky regions in the Middle East, Iran and North Africa,” said Laszlo Varro, the director of the Gas, Coal and Power Markets Division of the International Energy Agency.

Last year Ukraine consumed about 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, most of it imported from Russia, while producing about 19 billion cubic meters, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Shale gas technologies are altering the geopolitics of energy from Russia to the Middle East. Three territories — Russia, Iran and Qatar — hold about half the conventional reserves of natural gas. But shale is found in many other places, including India, China, Australia and in Eastern Europe, undercutting the power of the oil sheikhs and the Kremlin.

Ukraine, despite producing some domestic gas by conventional extraction, remains highly dependent on Russia’s Gazprom, which cut off its supplies in 2006 and 2009 in pricing disputes. As a result, Ukraine pays exceptionally high prices for natural gas,

A Multibillion-Dollar Question for Airbus and Its A330

While the A330 continues to generate around 40 percent of Airbus’s civilian aircraft profits, new orders for the plane have slowed significantly in recent years.

But with the wait times to receive new planes now stretching to more than six years, airlines have been slower to reach for their checkbooks.

Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy

Some economists argue that the region is already well into a so-called lost decade.

Analysts surmised that the strained relations with Russia as well as turmoil in the Middle East had undercut demand for Italian exports, in particular fashion and other luxury goods.

Dubai, Once a Humble Refueling Stop, Is Crossroad to the Globe

Five years ago, the global credit crisis brought Dubai near bankruptcy. But the city has recovered its drive, helped partly by a $10 billion bailout from neighboring Abu Dhabi, and a return of investors from the Middle East and Eastern Europe

Dubai’s success has rattled its rivals, particularly airlines in Europe and the United States, which have complained that traffic was being siphoned from their hubs.

Death by Finance

First, emerging-market hype is just that. Economic miracles rarely occur, and for good reason. Governments that can intervene massively to restructure and diversify the economy, while preventing the state from becoming a mechanism of corruption and rent-seeking, are the exception.

the rapid industrialization that they engineered has eluded most of Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

Africa’s Structural Transformation Challenge

As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”

Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.

Although the Arctic provides a shorter route around the world than the traditional course through warmer waters, it is not necessarily cheaper.

The ships were expensive to build and operate,