Adventure Ausrama Blog

While glucosamine has priced itself out of reach of the average consumer, sales of fish oil are still booming. Just about everyone you bump into is on it. The problem is the world-wide market is not sufficiently policed to ensure a healthy product. Cut prices for this popular addition to diet is a feature of the market. But are we paying the price? Tests show that the majority of packaged fish oil is contaminated and labels stated omega-3 fatty acid at much higher levels than reality. In other words suppliers are lying. Less than 10 per cent of tested sealed fish oil had the printed omega-3 fatty acid level. Some capsules are downright dangerous to take. In 92 per cent of tested packages the omega-3 fatty acid had oxidised - that is "gone off". What is more frightening is that most fish oil comes from two first world countries, namely, Australia and New Zealand. What happened to the philosophy of only exporting the best? This is disgraceful. Internation...

Adopting battery powered cars is the worst thing societies can do. It is just a transfer from dirty oil engines to dirty oil power station. Removal of carbon at power stations is talked about a lot. However, nothing has been achieved. Experiments have largely failed. The distance barrier is still a problem for battery cars. To go more than two hundred miles requires an enormous battery, far to heavy to put in vehicles. Price is still an issue : there is little hope of a reduction even with mass production. Weak demand continues. Planners are saying that the lack of battery "charge" centers is the main barrier. This is only secondary. Where does the capital come from to build them? Battery swap stations were established by the Electric Light Company to service a fleet of electric trucks a century ago. Buses in China get new batteries en route. The trucks disappeared and Chinese buses are government run. Changing to a recharged battery is not cost effective. If ...

There has always been a belief that Australia's future lies in finding a mineral that is plentiful in the north west of the country. Till now this has not been achieved. Everyone knows that Western Australia is full of iron ore so this is not what they are looking for. Drilling for many years has just made holes in the ground. Companies have gone over ground already explored before. This is how the latest find was made. There is oil there and in vast quantities. Apache Corp. has made the announcement that was greeted with surprise by some people. Apache was searching for gas when it made the discovery. Considering Australia's oil production has fallen to its lowest level for forty years this can only be good news. Income to Western Australia from iron ore has declined due to a fall in Chinese demand. The price for iron ore is down by a third since January. Australia is producing far more ore than it can sell. Coal is not doing well either. The oil ...

Drilling techniques in industry have not changed for decades. Oil rigs are built in he same old way. Now something has come along that will improve drilling enormously. The Deep Exploration Technologies Cooperative Research Centre based in Adelaide has announced a new type of drill. It is constructed with coiled tubing. Costs will fall dramatically as drilling is faster . Australia's mines are mostly over 30 years old. New mines have to be established. We can only rely on the old mines for another 20 years. No longer is it necessary to keep stopping to add a new drilling section. The new drill is a continuous coil of tubing. Being smaller and lighter transportation is easy. The motor is at the bottom of the shaft, not at the top. The tubing no longer twists during drilling. Any twisting will occur in the other direction as the motor pulls the tubing around. Less drilling power is needed as the tubing is being pulled around in already drilled space. A lot ...

It seems it is not only nuclear power that pollutes the earth with radioactive substances. For centuries coal and oil production has brought thousands of tons of polluted material from beneath the planet to the surface. Further processing concentrates it even more.  Apparently the sludge is left lying around and is not isolated from the population. For every barrel of oil pumped up into storage, ten barrels of polluted water is dragged up as well. Uranium and radium occur naturally below ground. In the US plastic pipes used in the production process were given to kindergartens to make playground equipment. The coal and oil industry has known for many years about the problem but has kept very quiet about it. While nuclear power stations are closely monitored, limits are set high for coal and oil which allows producers to pollute at will. Tests for radioactivity on dumps of sludge give readings 700 times higher than clean areas. With new housing estates being built on top of dis...

The National Sustainability Council presented its long awaited report called the Sustainable Australia 2013: Conversations with the Future . This is the first of a series of biennial papers to advise the government about the state of the economy vis-a-vis the environment. Full of optimism, the newly founded council said the future looked bright if we changed to building sustainable communities. However, the type of community needed is far more radical than envisaged by the council. Despite Australia having many of the most livable cities in the world we need to start planning immediately for the kind of balanced society of the future. Oil will not be around forever and coal is too polluting to be used at such high rates. This means individuals driving around in five seater cars will not be possible. Electricity use is skyrocketing with Internet cloud servers and hungry mobiles gobbling up tonnes of coal and oil in power stations. Future cities will have to be designed with hou...

Some countries are moving toward other fuels such as coal gas. However, public opinion about it polluting the environment could bring an end to the trend of companies running roughshod over properties belonging to others. The search is driven by potential profit not for any long-term goal. People are complacent. Australia is dependent on fuel from mainly Middle Eastern countries. If a major conflagration occurred there the Australian economy would come to a standstill in a matter of weeks. Rationing would have to be introduced immediately. Health and food would be the main priorities. Distribution would be hit hard as it uses most of the oil imported, apart from private use of motor vehicles. Australia does not keep an oil reserve. Even though some countries have reserves. It would put off the economic hit for a few months. What is shocking is that even dried food in this country would last only nine days. Using solar power for transport is not possible. If such a scenari...

Over recent years there has been a host of controversial claims about fish oil, calcium and glucosamine. The questions are do these supplements do any good and do they all have to be taken? Some doctors say take them and other GPs say claims about them are nonsense. Some tests have been done. It has still not been proven that taking calcium prevents deterioration of bones in old age. And there is no proof that glucosamine gets into joints thus reducing pain. Tests on fish oil offer some hope of benefit. During research into omega 3 (which is in fish oil) on young children a potential benefit came to light. It seems that premature birth is delayed when fish oil is taken. Omega 3 prolongs pregnancy. Subjects who took the supplement also had larger babies. Their birth date was later than predicted. Of course, this brings up another question: Are heavier babies healthier? As the cause of premature birth is unknown perhaps this benefit overrides the perceived consequences of la...

It seems that we have pushed the peak oil period further forward by obtaining coal seam gas from just about everywhere we look. Fracking does damage the environment and the current freedom for the gas companies could be curtailed. When peak oil is reached the impact on Australia's rural areas will be significant. Supplies of oil will fall and prices for the scarce commodity will rise. Farmers use advanced machinery to sow, plant and harvest food crops. If governments set priorities then agriculture will have to be given precedence over private use. Transport will be next in line. There are two aspects of transport. Movement of food is very important, but as people will not be able to freely use their cars they will opt for public transport to get to their places of employment. People will have to live with limited mobility as they did in the days of the horse and buggy. A day out will be a luxury. Economies will go into recession as trade slows down. Perhaps people will ...

The Nullarbor plain in the central-southern part of Australia is one of the driest regions on Earth. It is called the Ceduna Delta. The Murray-Darling further to the east is the largest river system extant today. It is difficult to accept that the Nullarbor was created by many small rivers flowing southward into the ocean. These rivers flowed very fast cutting through hills which were formed by the land rising between Australia and Antarctica. Ultimately, sediment was deposited in the drying riverbeds. Analysis of sediment from drillings in the delta showed rivers flowed there 80 million years ago. Sources of gas and oil have been identified which could be tapped in the future. The Ceduna Delta is as large as the Niger Delta in Africa. It contains half a million cubic kilometers of sedimentary sandstome and shales. Hydrocarbon reserves are already being exploited in the Niger Delta. Because the "destination" of the rivers was close to the Great Australian Bight lar...

We are obsessed with the oil crisis. So much so that we fail to see other problems that face us in the near future. For example, what about fresh drinking water. If nothing is done soon, the world will be in crisis. Even countries with cold climates, in Europe, are facing a shortage of potable water because of the high population density. As people become Westernized they consume more water. They change from bathing when they can, to having showers every day. Production oil also impacts on the availability of water. it takes 2.5 liters of water to produce every liter of oil. Even growing bio fuels puts pressure on water, with a thousand liters of water needed to make a liter of bio fuel. The modern way of life is water "heavy": Wealthy people use 3,000 liters of water each day to live their lives. More drought in the world is putting prices of everything up. When water gets short it does so locally. Moving water from one place to another in bulk is problematical. In the shor...

There is hope yet that people will reduce their use of fossil fuel. CSIRO is working with universities to make biofuels from enzyme interaction with plant waste. The product will be low-emission. It will not divert resources from food production because only unwanted plant material will be used. The mere growing of food crops will balance out the carbon dioxide pushed into the environment by using such fuels. Growing plants absorb carbon dioxide thus keeping it out of the atmosphere. More profit for the farmer from this by-product is a good thing because it will encourage planting of more crops. With oil running out it is paramount to find other ways of creating fuel. Enzymes that will do this have been identified by CSIRO . The research body's target sector is transport, freight movers. Trucking causes a third of the toxic gases emitted into the environment. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/Advent...