Green Plumbing The Depths & Biofueling The Heights

Australia’s blue collar construction workers are going green and at the forefront of change will be plumbers who deliver the majority of energy consumed in buildings, according to The Fifth Estate reporting from Green Cities, while Air New Zealand says it may take longer than first thought to reach its goal of replacing 10% of the jet fuel it uses for its aircraft with biofuel.

Steve Creedy in The Australian February 19, 2010

AIR New Zealand plans to convert its domestic ground handling equipment to use either electricity or biodiesel, but says it may take longer than first thought to reach its goal of replacing 10 per cent of the jet fuel it uses for its aircraft with biofuel.

The airline took part in a biofuel test flight at the end of 2008 and spent much of last year focusing on how to introduce the greener energy option to its operations.

The carbon penalty involved in moving fuel long distances meant the carrier spent much of last year looking at New Zealand options for feedstocks before settling on cellulose and algae as the two main contenders.

Air NZ chief executive Rob Fyfe said the algae developments looked promising in the longer term, with a potential rollout in five to 10 years.

He said the benefit of algae was that, under the right conditions, it could double its mass in 24 hours, but there were challenges around how to feed it, how to harvest it and how to extract oil from it in a way that was economically viable and did not consume more energy than it created.

“A lot of people will tell you that they can generate a very high quality biofuel out of algae, and they can, but it’s the scalability and commercialisation of the process that presents major challenges,” he said.

Mr Fyfe said cellulose feedstock basically involved wood pulp and there were a number of initiatives under way around the world that looked feasible in the next one to two years.

He said Air New Zealand expected to use biofuel initially on its domestic network, where a 70-80 per cent market share justified installing the necessary infrastructure, Mr Fyfe said.

“Our goal originally was that we were hopeful we could get to that stage by 2013,” he said.

“It’s clear now that the development of the feedstock is not going to move at that speed. So it will be the development of the feedstock that will be the constraining factor.

“Until we’ve chosen the feedstock and we’ve determined what the scalability of that feedstock is, then it’s hard to lock down a specific target. But I’m still looking at that three to five-year horizon. You’ve got to keep this stuff in the near term.”

The use of biofuels on international routes would depend on the dominant players in various areas but was likely to involve a 10-year, rather than a five-year, horizon, Mr Fyfe said.

Source: www.theaustralian.com.au

The Fifth Estate reports from Green Cities(21 February 2010):

While architects, engineers and developers are learning the “green” game, so too are Australia’s blue collar construction workers. And at the forefront of change will be plumbers who deliver the majority of energy consumed in buildings, according to The Fifth Estate reporting from Green Cities.

According to the Green Building Council of Australia major re-training is under way in a variety of trades delivering buildings in the commercial and residential sphere.

“Plumbers are considering ways to save water, bricklayers are recycling whatever they can and electricians are laying cables in buildings without ceilings in a revolution which is changing building sites right across Australia,” the GBCA’s executive director of education and marketing, Tania Crosbie said.

Blue collar building jobs, estimated to be around 1 million Australia-wide, now feature a wide range of jobs considered “green” Ms Crosbie said.

“The green economy in Australia is believed to be worth about $17 billion and forecasts indicate that another 850,000 green collar jobs will be created over the next 20 years,” she said.

“In the past five years, the GBCA has trained over 14,500 people working in property and construction in the use of the green building environmental rating system, Green Star.”

Plumbers could well be leading the way.

Vin Ebejer, general manager of the Plumbing Industry Climate Action Centre, which opened in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Brunswick last year, more than 70 per cent of the energy consumed in a house was delivered by the plumbing system.

“The importance of having plumbers well trained and well versed in sustainability issues cannot be overstated,” he said.

“Most plumbers were trained before the invention of green technologies. Significant amounts of training
must occur to upskill these plumbers so that they can meet consumer demand for their services.”

The Green Cities 2010 will discuss these issues in a special sitting of the conference under way 21-23 February in Melbourne.

21 February, 2010

Source: www.thefifthestate.com.au