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A rare jaguar sighting in the US, a green toad and spring flowers are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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A trial suggests that an Ebola vaccine could protect gorillas and chimps from the deadly disease.

In the remote Altai mountains, cameras traps are shedding light on the secret lives of these elusive animals, enabling researchers to identify individual leopards in the first ever nationwide census

The snow leopard is so rare and elusive that it’s commonly known as the “ghost of the mountains”. But researchers in the Altai mountains, where the borders of Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China converge, are increasingly coming face to face with this endangered animal through a growing network of camera traps.

On a recent day in Sailyugem national park in Russia’s Altai Republic, rangers in ski goggles and huge parkas were retrieving footage from a high-altitude camera trap – a black box holding a dozen AA batteries, a memory card and a motion-activated lens – nestled among a cluster of dark burgundy rocks covered with orange and green lichen. Such windswept ridges are where snow leopards typically travel in search of prey such as ibex and musk deer, sneaking down from above to break the victim’s neck with one crunch of their powerful jaws.

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Ship ran aground at Raja Ampat, one of the country’s most popular dive sites that has been likened to an underwater Amazon, reports Mongabay

One of the main coral reefs at Raja Ampat, an Indonesian island chain home to perhaps the world’s richest marine biodiversity, was severely damaged last week when a Bahamian-flagged cruise ship smashed into it at low tide, according to an official report.

The 90-meter Caledonian Sky, owned by tour operator Noble Caledonia, ran aground in an uncharted shoal in West Papua province after completing a bird-watching trip on Waigeo Island on 4 March.

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“Flabbergas” in Beijing

The Sichuan basin is one of China’s premier shale gas plays, and when it comes to developing Chinese resources, state-owned enterprises like Sinopec have the inside running.

I met with Sinopec geologists earlier this week in Beijing to discuss collaborations and asked how their Sichuan Basin gas plays were shaping up. I was curious, having been told some years back by a senior Shell shale-gas engineer his view was “too deep and too tight”. After some initial interest, in 2016 Shell announced it was getting out of the Sichuan.

Somewhat to my surprise, my Sinopec colleagues were very upbeat claiming their shale gas production was on target. With a production schedule targeting some 8000 terajolues per day I wondered aloud, how long they thought they would need our LNG exports. They must have sensed some concern and quickly said not to worry. The cost of production from their Sichuan plays was well above the price they were paying for our gas. They wouldn’t be leaving us stranded any time soon, they assured me.

I then told them about the domestic prices here in Australia, where spot prices regularly sit at around $12 per petajoule and where future contracts are reputedly now being offered at up to $20 petajoule. Their reaction, in a word, “flabbergasted”. How could it be that we paid more for our own gas than they did to import it? For reference, Henry Hub spot prices in the US are currently settling at around AUD$3.4 per petajoule, just 30% of the Australian price (AUD$11.4) at the time of writing.

And importing our gas, the Chinese are. Back in 2015, BP reported that China imported around 50 million tonnes in barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) in energy terms, representing about 6000 terajolues per day.

Chinese gas production and consumption figures as terms of Million of barrels of oil equivalent per year, until end of 2015. Data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2016. While production has risen sharply, more than doubling in the last decade, consumption has risen much faster with a separation occurred around 2008. Consumption outstripped production by about 50 million tonnes in 2015, the equivalent of 7000 terajolues per day. Eastern Australian gas exported via the Gladstone ports will make a significant contribution to Chinese imports into the future, because the marginal cost of production in China’s frontier unconventional basins such as the Sichuan is above the price they pay to import.

The Gladstone Port Authority reported a touch under one million tonnes of LNG left Curtis Island in Queensland bound for China last December. That amounts to a daily rate of about 1600 terajolues. In total, Curtis island shipped 1.7 million tonnes in 27 cargoes in December, equating to about 3000 terajolues per day. That represented around 70% of the total production of 4200 terajolues per day from all the gas fields across eastern and southern Australia that are physically connected to the export facilities. The exports outstripped our domestic consumption in the eastern states by a factor of about 2.5.

The point is worth reiterating. In December last year more gas was shipped to China from Queensland than was used locally across the four eastern sea- board states and South Australia. That wouldn’t be a problem if there was enough gas to go round. But there is not, and instead we have entered the “red zone”.

Into the “red zone”

With the first shipments leaving Gladstone just a touch over two years ago, in January 2015, it is hardly surprising that the gas market is causing ructions here in Australia. In fact it shouldn’t surprise anyone as problems were anticipated as far back as 2013, as I discussed in a post mid last year titled “We really must talk about gas”.

And so it would seem we are now really talking about gas.

As illustrated in the figure below, the last few years have witnessed an unprecedented change in our eastern gas market. Production has risen 250% in just two years, from an average of 1800 terajolues per day in the last half of 2014 through to 4600 terajolues per day in last half of 2016.

Total production from the gas fields serving the eastern Australian gas market, coloured by producing region, along with the monthly averaged exports from Gladstone. Production data from AEO, export data from Gladstone Port Authority.

Also shown is exported gas, and the amount of gas used to deliver gas from the producing fields to the export facilities. The amount of additional gas needed for processing is a somewhat uncertain number but is likely to be more than 10%. In the figure above I assume 12%. Finally, I also show the contracted position of our LNG exporters who are ramping up to around 24 million tonnes of LNG exports per year (CLE), with an assumed additional load of almost 3 million tonnes needed to deliver that to the cargo (marked as “CLE+proc”).

So how does the figure above help us understand what has happened to so dramatically upset our gas markets here in Australia.

Firstly, note how our exports have tracked upwards more steeply than the production from our developing coal-seam gas fields in Queensland from the production region of Roma (shown in green). In the last few months the combination of exports plus the new processing load has begun to outstrip the total production from the new CSG-fields. Production from our older, conventional gas fields such as the Gippsland Basin in Victoria (in red) and the Cooper Basin in South Australia (in dark blue) is being partially used to fill the export cargoes. In short, we are short on gas, having entered the “red zone”.

In a previous postI have discussed the recent dynamics of gas pricing and availability in the National electricity market and its impact on prices, showing how quick we have switched from the “ramp-gas phase”. That is the stage when CSG fields were being developed prior to the completion of the export facilities, providing abundant flows of cheap gas for the local market. Now we are in the “scarce-gas” phase, or the “red-zone” as I like to call it. It is one of the key reasons for the recent doubling of spot electricity prices (another is the extra electricity demand from the LNG processing themselves, providing a double whammy for electricity users, as explained here). But scarcity pricing in the gas market is affecting all users, not just electricity generators.

And the reality is that now we are in the “red-zone” scarcity pricing is here to stay. In the medium-term it only seems likely to get worse. If no new production is bought to market, exports rise to meet contracts, and around 12% of additional gas is needed for export processing, then we we will be excising conventional resources to the export market at a rate of about 400 terajolues per day or about 30% of what would otherwise have been available for domestic use. While there remain many “ifs” in that scenario, it is a hugely worrying shift in the balance of demand and supply.

With politicians now scurrying to address the situation it is worth reflecting why has it taken so long to do so. It is not as though it wasn’t predicted. To quote from that earlier piece of mine - developing the new CSG fields at such scale was always going to risk that production would fall short of targets. As much was acknowledged by the 2013 Department of Industry and Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics study into Eastern Australian gas markets

The current development of LNG in eastern Australia and the expected tripling of gas demand are creating conditions that are in stark contrast to those in the previously isolated domestic gas market. The timely development of gas resources will be important to ensure that supply is available for domestic gas users and to meet LNG export commitments. Such is the scale of the LNG projects that even small deviations from the CSG reserve development schedule could result in significant volumes of gas being sourced from traditional domestic market supplies

That was some 2 years before the first LNG exports. Now some four years on and it is patently clear that Eastern Australia is short on gas, given the existing export contracts. While new conventional fields such as Kipper in the Gipplsand Basin are coming on stream (often with a hefty load of CO2 to complicate matters), existing fields are depleting.

To remedy the situation, there will be predictable calls such as for gas reservation (including by myself), and new exploration, including the lifting of on-shore moratoriums. All should be considered from a rational perspective, since the situation is urgent. But it should be eyes-wide-open, as all have problems.

No doubt, new production from unconventional resources such as shale and tight gas might alleviate the scarcity pricing events we are witnessing as we now enter the “red zone”, but it will not return us to the halcyon days to times past. Developing new unconventional gas fields is generally proving expensive. Just ask the Chinese. It is after all why they will continue to import our gas. The exception is the US, and that’s because US shale gas rides on the back of the US shale oil. Unconventional gas with liquids is a whole different ball-game.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from ANLEC and from the ARC.

A geobiologist has built this complex of buildings out of eco-friendly materials around a wooden main house, with scope for tourist rentals

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Cairngorms National Park We’ve tried to spot this mountain dwelling grouse in its white-feathered finery, but it’s elusive

Every birder has a “bogey bird”, a species they have repeatedly failed to encounter. For my father and me, this bird is the winter-plumaged ptarmigan.

We have made numerous visits to the Cairngorms in the hopes of seeing this mountain dwelling grouse – Lagopus mutus – in its white-feathered finery. But it has proved to be frustratingly elusive. Previous attempts have been foiled by extreme weather, from 90mph winds and whiteout conditions to horizontal rain and shrouding cloud.

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Former Climate Change Authority member reveals what went on before he quit and offers a withering assessment of the PM

Clive Hamilton has been at the pointy end of public discourse on climate change for more than 20 years.

Among lots of other things, he’s written challenging books on the science, founded a progressive thinktank and had a failed crack at being an MP for the Greens.

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The biggest problem facing Australia's National Electricity Market is that it has no management team. But someone has to accept responsibility for the mess.

Perovskite PV technology demonstrated on industrially-applicable roll-to-roll processes

Another 300 solar powered, energy efficient low-income homes to be built in Sydney, backed by $130m from Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Wind and solar offer the cheapest form of abatement and the falling cost of storage means its beating out gas. Welcome to the new NEM.

Summer of record heat waves and unplanned electricity outages pushes rooftop solar installations up nearly 50% on this time last year.

Russian architect Alexei Umarov thinks his HyperFilter building could be a pollution solution.

Could smelly maps linked to the odours of a city play a role in fighting dirty air? Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath follows his nose.

If all customers with premier solar feed in tariff used its residual value to purchase a battery storage system, Australia could have a 960MW virtual power plant, at no additional cost to customers.

The Climate Institute, Australia’s first NGO to focus solely on climate change, is to shut down at the end of June after 12 years.

It was born into an era when politicians and voters were finally waking up to the importance of climate policy. But now, its self-described “centrist, pragmatic advocacy” has run out of financial backing.

Early years

It’s easy to forget, given the political theatrics we’ve witnessed over the past decade, just how little attention was being paid to climate policy before the explosion of concern in late 2006. Life was bleak for environmental groups under the four Howard governments from 1996 to 2007, with the partial and controversial exception of WWF.

Climate change was simply not an issue that had traction with the federal government, and the business community had fought itself to a standstill on the topic of whether Australia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which John Howard resisted to the end.

Bob Carr, the then premier of New South Wales, had been trying to get carbon trading onto state and federal agendas with limited success.

By 2004 attitudes were shifting, not least because of the ongoing Millennium Drought. In a 2015 interview Clive Hamilton, a climate policy academic and inaugural board chair of the Climate Institute, noted:

In the early 2000s when the environment groups started to get serious about climate change, they adopted their standard tactics, which had run out of steam. The problem for environmentalism in Australia, as well as internationally, is that they had this glorious period of the 1980s and ‘90s, and then they became institutionalised; their tactics became stale. It wasn’t their fault – it’s just the world changed.

Hamilton explained that in 2005, Mark Wootton, director of the Poola Foundation, approached him saying that he had A$5 million and wanted to spend it on something that would “cut through” the stagnant climate change debate. Hamilton thought about it and proposed the Climate Institute, which he put together over the ensuing months. After chairing the board for its first year Hamilton returned to his duties at the Australia Institute.

Launching a tour of rural Australia the following year, Wootton told journalists:

People have to see there is a solution, that there is a way out… It’s about people moving on and not feeling that sense of despair, which I’ve genuinely felt, and that’s why we set this up.

The institute opened its doors in October 2005 and was soon in the headlines. Howard attacked Carr, declaring himself “amazed a former Labor premier should advocate that we should sign up to something that would export the jobs of Australian workers”.

A month later, the Climate Institute returned fire with an attack on the Howard government’s Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, widely interpreted as a way for polluting nations to dodge Kyoto.

This pattern of well-timed reports and timely rebuttals has continued over the past 12 years. During this time the Climate Institute has challenged successive governments to do more, to create stronger policy and a more predictable investment environment – something that is sorely lacking to this day.

The institute’s critics will claim it never escaped the neoliberal paradigm – the idea that the market can and will deliver as long as the right policy levers are pulled at the right time. In fairness, though, it never pledged to transcend free-market economics anyway, although it also tried along the way to expand the argument to include moral (and religious) values.

Main achievements

In the reporting on the institute’s demise, its main claims to fame are listed as helping to expand the renewable energy target in 2008, saving the Climate Change Authority from Tony Abbott’s axe in 2014, and building bipartisan support for Australia to ratify the Paris climate agreement in 2016.

But there was much else that the Climate Institute worked on, which is in danger of being forgotten.

It toured rural Australia to listen to farmers’ concerns.

It tried to signal to politicians that voters cared. For example, before the “first climate change election” in November 2007, it commissioned a poll of 877 voters in nine key marginal electorates. It found that 73% of voters thought climate change would have either a strong or a very strong influence on their vote at the election, an increase from 62% in August.

It also played a part in stitching together what political scientists call “advocacy coalitions”. One notable example was its help in producing the Common belief: Australia’s faith communities on climate change report, released in December 2006 with input from 16 Australian communities including Aboriginal Australians, Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other denominations.

Why it died and what next?

The institute’s outgoing chief executive, John Connor, told Reneweconomy that the decision ultimately comes down to funding:

We haven’t been able to plug the [funding] gap. Centrist, pragmatic advocacy is not sexy for many people who want to fund the fighters or pour funds into new technology.

As such, the Climate Institute is another victim of the policy paralysis that has exasperated and bewildered commentators.

It is indeed hard to justify the funding of calm, measured policy advice when the mere mention of the most economically tame of notions – an emissions intensity scheme – causes panic and retreat in the federal government.

Climatologist and Climate Council member Will Steffen, interviewed on the ABC, suggested that over the past two or three years many organisations have begun to take climate change on board, and so the institute’s unique role was lessened.

But one piece of the furniture that urgently needs saving is the institute’s Climate of the Nation, the longest trend survey of the attitudes of Australians to climate change and its solutions. Hopefully another organisation (I’m looking at you, Australian Conservation Foundation) will pick this up.

The staff of the Climate Institute will hopefully find new roles within the now smaller ecosystem of environmental policy advice. With the impacts that the institute and others were warning about in 2005 arriving with depressing predictability, Australia desperately needs three things.

It needs community energy programs. It needs effective opposition to plans for yet more fossil fuel extraction. And most relevantly here, it needs a cacophony of well-informed and relentless voices advocating for the most useful policies to get the carbon out of our economy.

There’s a fourth thing, actually: luck. From here on we are going to need an enormous (and undeserved) amount of luck if the lost years of ignoring sensible climate policy advice are not to come back and haunt us.

Marc Hudson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Security could increasingly rely on smart machines that spot cyber threats rather than on humans.

New EPA Pruitt won’t listen to scientists, but he promises he’s listening to industry.