Iran Abandons Chinese Help, to Build World’s Highest Hydroelectric Plant Alone
By John Daly | OilPrice.com | April 1, 2013
Iran, pummeled by years of international sanctions, has had two energy goals.
First, to preserve its dwindling international hydrocarbon market share, increasingly battered by years of U.S. and UN sanctions designed to slow down and halt its civilian nuclear energy program, which Washington and Tel Aviv have long insisted masks a covert program to develop a nuclear weapons program.
The second, much less reported in the foreign press, is to diversify its indigenous energy infrastructure, so as to preserve its hydrocarbon assets for the long term.
In pursuit of the latter goal, Iran is ramping up its hydroelectric program.
Iran currently has 23 operational hydropower plants, with a combined electricity generating capacity of 8.2 gigawatts, 14 percent of the nation’s total generating capacity of 58.5 gigawatts. A further 4.8 gigawatts of capacity is under construction, with 12.7 gigawatts of hydro capacity either undergoing feasibility study or in the early design stages.
The centerpiece of Iran’s hydroelectric ambitions is the $1.5 billion Bakhtiari Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant in southwest Iran across the Bakhtiari River in the Zargos mountains in Iran’s western Lurestan province, with a capacity of about 169 billion cubic feet of water.
Due to open in 2014, the Bakhtiari Dam HPP will be the tallest dam in the world at 1,033 feet, surpassing China’s 1,000 foot Jinping-I Hydropower Station. The Bakhtiari HPP will be a double-arch concrete dam, creating a reservoir with an area of 5,900 hectares, with six 250 megawatt turbines providing a generating capacity of 1.5 gigawatts.
Feasibility studies for the Bakhtiari Dam HPP began in 1996, but ongoing problems saw a design team comprising Iranian and Swiss consultancies appointed in May 2005. The most notable delay was caused by the 2002 liquidation of the German contractor originally appointed to build the scheme. Tightening international sanctions made Tehran’s efforts to secure international financing more and more strained.
Enter the Chinese, with Sinohydro and Iran’s Faban taking over the project in 2007, with Chinese banks to provide the estimated $2 billion financing. Two years ago a Tehran-based consulting engineer noted, “For the past year, with the financial sanctions, it has been difficult to purchase equipment for hydro projects here. Projects have been pretty much limited to using Chinese manufacturers or trying to make parts locally. This has slowed down a number of schemes, especially those that have had to change their equipment specifications midway through construction. Nonetheless, they are moving forward. Sanctions have just meant that projects won’t necessarily have the best equipment installed and may take longer and cost more.”
Iran Water & Power Resources Developer Co. is overseeing the Bakhtiari Dam HPP. Since being established in 1989, IWPCO has been responsible for the construction of all new hydropower plants in Iran.
Interestingly, IWPCO remains coy about who will manufacture the facility’s turbines. The IWPCO website states about the electrical generation power facilities, “type of generators,” only the cryptic comment, “being designed.”
Two years ago, China’s Sinohydro Corp, constructor of China’s massive Three Gorges HPP, signed a contract to construct the Bakhtiari Dam HPP, Iran’s the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) reported, with a projected timeline of five years to complete.
Well, something disrupted the deal, though neither side is saying, as last June Iran’s government decided to withdraw from the deal, which analysts believe may be linked to the dissatisfaction of Iran’s central bank with loan options issued by the Chinese.
Showing some admirable bravado, IWPCO’s Mohammad-Reza Rezazadeh stated that Iran is considered among the most advanced countries in dam construction and engineering.
So, will Iran’s indigenous industrial base be able to pull off the Bakhtiari Dam HPP without either Chinese expertise or funding? Given that China is currently Iran’s largest export market for oil exports, no doubt there will be some more “frank and candid” discussions, little if any of which will leak to the Western press.
John Daly is CEO of U.S.-Central Asia Biofuels Ltd
Ahmadinejad inaugurates world’s tallest dam project in Lorestan
Press TV – March 28, 2013
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has inaugurated a major construction project to build the world’s tallest double-curved concrete arch dam in Iran’s western Lorestan Province.
In a Thursday ceremony in the city of Khorramabad, the president expressed gladness over launching the major project, which will be carried out entirely by Iranian experts and construction workers.
The 315-meter-tall (1,033 feet) dam has been designed to construct a hydroelectric power plant that will generate 1,500 megawatt electricity.
President Ahmadinejad described the Bakhtiari Dam project as a turning point in the path towards the development, progress and improvement of Lorestan Province.
The president added during the inauguration ceremony that the world’s tallest double-curved concrete dam is being built here by the “able hands and expertise of committed Iranian scientists and workforce.”
The dam will be built over Lorestan’s Bakhtiari River.
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Gaza fighters launch retaliatory strikes over prisoner’s death
Al-Akhbar | April 2, 2013
Gaza fighters fired retaliatory strikes on Tuesday, hours after the death in custody of a Palestinian who was denied appropriate cancer treatment, witnesses and the Israeli military said.
Witnesses told AFP that militants in Gaza City had fired three mortar rounds, but the army said only one projectile had landed, without causing any casualties.
Meanwhile, over 40 Palestinians angered by the death of Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh, 64, were injured in clashes with Israeli police and prison guards. Riots are believed to have swept through Israeli prisons, while guards used live fire and tear gas against the protesters.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP that the faction was watching the developments with “the greatest concern” and that Israel would “regret its continuing crimes”.
The last time Gaza fighters launched rocket fire was on March 21 during a visit by US President Barack Obama, when two rockets landed causing some damage but no injuries.
Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh’s death threatened to raise tensions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, after reports surfaced that Israeli authorities had denied care to the prisoner. Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqe likened Israel’s handling of Abu Hamdiyeh’s condition to a “slow death penalty.”
Israeli authorities claim they informed Abu Hamdiyeh, 64, of his illness in February, however, prisoner’s rights groups say the diagnosis occurred in August 2012. His lawyers and relatives report that Israeli doctors ran biopsies on him after he repeatedly complained of throat pains.
Palestinians have held several protests in recent weeks in support of more than 7,000 prisoners in Israeli jails, including over 300 children.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel had ignored long-standing pleas to free Abu Hamdiyeh, 64, sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for recruiting a bomber who planted explosives in a Jerusalem cafe. The bomb did not detonate.
“The Israeli government in its intransigence and arrogance refused to respond to Palestinian efforts to save the life of the prisoner,” Abbas told members of his Fatah party in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Abu Hamdiyeh is the second Palestinian to die in Israeli custody this year. Arafat Jaradat, 30, died after an interrogation session in February. Palestinian officials said he had been tortured, an allegation Israel denied.
News of Abu Hamdiyeh’s death touched off protests by Palestinian inmates in several Israeli prisons. At Ramon jail, in southern Israel, inmates threw objects at guards, who fired tear gas at them, the Prisons Service spokeswoman said.
Three prisoners and six guards were treated at the jail for tear gas inhalation, she said.
In Abu Hamdiyeh’s West Bank home city of Hebron, masked stone-throwers confronted Israeli soldiers. No serious injuries were reported.
Israel holds 178 Palestinians in administrative detention, who have been jailed without trial as suspected militants for renewable three- to six-month terms based on classified evidence.
Hundreds of sick Palestinians are perishing in Israeli jails, according to the Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Minister and activists. The Palestinian Prisoners Club says some 25 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are suffering from cancer.
Palestinians are expected to hold strikes across the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset have issued strongly worded condemnations of the Israeli government over Abu Hamdiyeh’s deah.
Rights groups, as well as Qaraqe, described Abu Hamdiyeh’s eight-hour trips to and from the hospital as hellish. He was transported in a corrugated metal van with no windows or seats.
The Palestinian Authority said they expected him to be released on Monday. Israel’s refusal to free Abu Hamdiyeh had sparked protests in several Israeli prisons, where 17 detainees have begun a hunger strike.
In recent weeks, Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad made intense efforts to secure Abu Hamdiyeh’s release in the light of his deteriorating health.
(Al-Akhbar, Reuters, AFP)
Sudan frees six political prisoners
Press TV – April 2, 2013
Six political prisoners have been freed, after President Omar al-Bashir ordered all political detainees to be released.
The release took place on Tuesday. Most of those freed are believed to have been held for more than two months at the Kober Prison in the capital Khartoum in connection with a conference in Uganda.
The conference held in January released a charter for using both armed and peaceful means to end the president’s 24-year rule.
“We confirm we will continue our communication with all political and social powers without excluding anyone, including those who are armed, for a national dialogue which will bring a solution to all the issues,” said Bashir.
Meanwhile, the opposition headed by Farouk Abu Issa has said that Bashir’s move to release the political detainees is a step toward genuine talk.
Vice President Ali Osman Taha made an offer last week to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-North) rebels and opposition political parties to partake in a constitutional dialogue.
The country is in need of a new constitution to replace the 2005 document, which was based on a peace agreement that ended the country’s 23-year civil war.
The peace agreement also led to the country’s splitting up in July of 2011, causing South Sudan to become an independent nation.
Related article
- Bashir to release political prisoners (morningstaronline.co.uk)
Venezuela’s Maduro leads latest poll before election
Xinhua – April 1, 2013
CARACAS — With the presidential election less than two weeks away, Venezuelan Acting President Nicolas Maduro led opposition leader Henrique Capriles by 20 percent in latest polls.
According to results released Monday by local pollster company Hinterlaces, Maduro, late President Hugo Chavez’s political heir, would get 55 percent of the vote against 35 percent for Capriles, who was defeated by Chavez in last year’s election.
Asked about their projection of the two candidates’ winning chances, 61 percent people chose Maduro and only 22 percent opted for Capriles.
The survey, conducted in March among 1,100 people across the country, has a 3-percent margin of error, the company said.
The official pollster GIS XXI on Monday released a similar poll result, predicting that Maduro would win the election with 55.3 percent of the vote.
Another survey, also conducted by the Venezuelan Institute for Data Analysis in March, showed that 53.8 percent of the 1,200 respondents would vote for Maduro, compared with 30.8 percent for Capriles.
The presidential election campaign will officially begin on Tuesday.
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- Polls Show Maduro Leading Capriles for Venezuelan Presidential Elections – Aletho News
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- Capriles rails against acting president’s ‘heirs of Hitler’ statement – Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Peru: scandal over Israeli security contractor
WW4 Report – 03/31/2013
Peru’s Congress has opened a high-profile investigation into a contract with Israeli security firm Global CST, entered into by the previous government of Álan García, an audit by the Comptroller General of the Republic found irregularities in the deal. The probe concluded that the Peruvian state had lost $16 million when the firm failed to fulfil terms of its contract with the Armed Forces Joint Command. A congressional oversight commission has questioned three former cabinet members in the scandal—ex-housing minister Hernán Garrido, and ex-defense ministers Ántero Flores Aráoz and Rafael Rey—as well as ex-Joint Command chief Gen. Francisco Contreras. Special anti-corruption prosecutor Julio Arbizu has called on García himself to testify before what is being called the Mega-Commission, and for the attorney general’s office, or Fiscalía, to investigate the former president.
Global CST, whose founder and director is IDF reserve Gen. Israel Ziv, was secretly contracted in 2009 to help Peru’s military fight remnant Sendero Luminoso rebels in the Apurímac-Ene River Valley (VRAE). Testimony and documents confirm that Rey exchanged communication directly with Israel’s then-foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman over the deal, and called upon him to pressure CST’s competitor Armaz to drop out of the bidding process. According to testimony, Garrido also helped Global CST arrange a similar deal with the government of Colombia before recommending the firm to Peru’s own armed forces.
Also named is ex-admiral Carlos Tubino, now a lawmaker for the Fuerza Popular party, headed by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of imprisoned ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori. Both Fujimoristas and supporters of García’s APRA charge that the investigation is politically motivated. (IPS, La Primera, March 22; Perú21, March 15; Perú21, March 8)
Controversy also surrounds contracts with the Israel Corporation, which has bought into Peru’s energy sector.
Top scientists to Obama: Ban mutation experiments that will make avian flu more infectious
RT | April 1, 2013
A group of leading scientists – including a Noble Prize winner – has proclaimed that it is “ethically and morally” wrong to alter the deadly H5N1 virus to make it more contagious for research purposes, and have asked President Obama to ban it.
“The accidental release of an artificial, laboratory-generated, human-transmissible H5N1 virus into the community has the potential to cause a global pandemic of epic proportions that would dwarf the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed over 50 million people,” read a letter to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
The petition was drafted by the Foundation for Vaccine Research (FVR), a scientific advocacy group, and numbered world-leading biologists among the 17 signatories, including Lord May, the former chief science advisor to the UK government, and Sir Richard Roberts, the recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Medicine, for genetics research.
Late in 2011, two groups of scientists courted controversy, when they prepared to publish studies showing a modified version of the avian flu virus that could be passed through the air between mammals. In its current form, the virus, which has killed 60 percent of those it infects, is not easily caught by people from birds, and is even more difficult to transmit from one human to another.
But, Ron Fouchier, of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, from the University of Wisconsin, the scientists behind the purposeful mutations, known as gain-of-function studies, say the virus will itself change without lab research, and foreseeing its progression might enable a vaccine or cure to be developed sooner.
They had voluntarily placed a moratorium on gain-of-function research after their initial research created concern that details about how these modifications to a virus that has killed more than 350 people since its discovery in 2003, were achieved would fall in the hands of careless scientists or worse, terrorists and hostile governments.
The moratorium was lifted earlier this year.
“The recent calling off of the moratorium by 40 flu researchers alone – not funders, governments or international bodies – says it all. The flu community simply hasn’t understood that this is a hot-button issue that will not go away,” Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, one of the signatories, told UK’s Independent newspaper.
FVR hopes the further gain-of-function experiments – most of which are funded by the government – will be postponed, pending a more thorough scientific debate on the ethics.
The US government is currently making tentative steps to regulate the research. The White House has published a draft paper that would require government agencies to evaluate the potential risk of any study involving 15 most dangerous cultures, but it has no plans to curb gain-of-function studies altogether.
And even if the petitioners manage to persuade Barack Obama, their plea is unlikely to stem the tide of similar new manipulations around the world.
“The H5N1 studies represent the first of no doubt many such studies involving other potential pandemic pathogens. Gain-of-function studies with H5N1 virus are being conducted in China, and a team in The Netherlands is expanding their H5N1 studies to include studies with the H7N7 virus, and has announced plans to conduct similar gain-of-function studies with the SARS coronavirus,” admits the petition.
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