Manus Island gives Australia, PNG deadline

ABC

A landowners group on Manus Island has given Australia and Papua New Guinea until Tuesday to meet their demands surrounding its asylum seeker detention centre.

 Australia flew in its first group of asylum-seekers to the Manus Island detention centre on Wednesday but locals are threatening court action.

 Mary Handen from the Los Negros Landowner Group told Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney Australia has neglected to involve Manus Island residents in the running of the detention centre.

 "We're not happy at all," she said.

 "We wanted a chance to be given some of these contracts so that we're able to provide services and benefits from the economic spinoff of the processing centre."

 She says the landowners had agreed to give the government two weeks, which ends on Tuesday, November 27.

 "But in the meantime we're looking at our legal options, get a court injunction," she said.

 Earlier this month, landowners shut down the airport on Manus Island over their demands for work.

Divided opinions

Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney told Australia Network opinion about the processing centre on Manus Island is divided.

 "People who are going to benefit economically are rather welcoming of having the asylum seeker processing centre there," he said.

 He says groups like Los Negros do not oppose the asylum seeker processing centre but they are upset at being left out of negotiations completely.

 "Mary Handen's objections was that they're constantly hearing from Australia that Australia is supporting economic empowerment of people and trying to get economic development going in Papua New Guinea but something like this comes along and all the contracts seem to be going to companies based outside," he said.

 Dorney says Los Negros would be open to going into joint ventures with outside companies as well.

 There are, however, Manus Island residents who oppose the existence of the asylum seeker processing centre in the country.

 "There is a certain body of opinion on Manus - my wife is from there - that feels this is vey much Australia's problem and it's been dumped on Papua New Guinea and they don't think it should be happening," he said.

Eaglewood announces start of PPL 259 Drimgas seismic programme

Eaglewood Energy has announced the start of a new 2D seismic survey over Petroleum Prospecting License PPL 259 in Papua New Guinea, in support of selecting a drilling location in 2013.
The Corporation will initially carry out a 63 line km shoot over the western portion of the licence area, primarily focussed on high-grading the Nama and Malisa Leads delineated by seismic acquired in April 2012, as well as an exploration line over the Ekelesia Lead. A second phase of seismic data acquisition will be considered following the analysis of results from this first phase.
The first phase of the survey will take approx. three months, with interpreted results available by February 2013. The Corporation anticipates that results from the contingent second phase would be available by April 2013. The PPL 259 joint venture is scheduled to begin work commitment drilling operations in the licence next year.

Original article link
Source: Eaglewood Energy

Lessons for PNG from Taiwan

By MALUM NALU

Those who follow this blog know that I'm one of the staunchest critics of buai pekpek (betelnut shit) and littering in Port Moresby and Papua New Guinea, so coming to Taiwan for me has been like coming to heaven.
 I just took an evening stroll through the well-kept park next to the Monarch Plaza Hotel in Taoyuang City, Taiwan, wondering when we in PNG will look after our parks and playgrounds like this!
Clean, pretty flowers and plants, mum pushing babies on prams, couples walking their dogs, children and parents playing happily in the playground...we only dream about this in Papua New Guinea, and yet, it doesn't cost anything!
 I'm  posting because I hope it can inspire us to stop spitting buai pekpek, littering everywhere without a care in the world, and not taking care of our recreational facilities!
Here are some of the pictures I took today:

No buai pekpek in sight!

Immaculate sidewalk and evergreen garden against a spectacular backdrop of skyscrapers!

Wow!

An urban jungle

Green plants in an urban jungle

I love this!

Kiddies' playground

I loved walking in betwen these trees!

Beautiful!

Resthouse

Lovely sidewalk

Sidewalk in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, today...stunningly beautiful!

It takes teamwork to trim the trees

The rules of the park are laid out on these signboards

Take my breath away!

Playing with the dog in the park

Seats under shady trees

You can just sit down on the side and watch the world go by

My walk continues

Note the garbage bin on the side

This dog and his master were a delight to watch as doggie fetched the tennis when wherever his boss threw it

A man's best friend

Well-kept toilets

Sweeping the leaves and grass

Space age playground

Kiddies' playground

It doesn't cost much money for PNG to maintain a park like this, only common sense and self-respect!

The park with skyscrapers as a towering backdrop

Kiddies' playground

Kiddies' playground

Walkng through the park is a refreshing and unforgettable experience

More park scenes

That's the Monarch Plaza Hotel where I'm staying towering in the background

Plants are treated with loving care

Well-kept trees make the place so environmentally-friendly

Sidewalk in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, today...stunningly beautiful!

A magical moment...I walked through the park after lunch basking in after-rain sunshine, watching all the activities going on, including people walking and playing with their dogs. As I was walking out, this guy (of European descent) and his best friend, walked out and jumped on their scooter, doggie taking the captain's seat, and away they went!

Well-manicured flowers, which are treated with tender, loving care and respected by the public

Woman and her dog!

Horizon Oil seeks partner for PNG gas assets

By David Winning of Wall Street Journal

International energy companies seeking a foothold in Papua New Guinea’s nascent natural gas export industry are being courted with a new opportunity.
Sydney-based Horizon Oil is seeking to sell up to half of its assets in Papua New Guinea, after drilling results in the forelands region of the Southeast Asian country beat expectations and highlighted the potential for a new liquefied natural gas plant.

Getty Images

A deal could be worth around 250 million Australian dollars (US$259 million) based on recent transactions in Papua New Guinea, which U.K.-based consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates has reserves totaling at least 26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Papua New Guinea’s appeal as a gas exporter is growing in step with Asia’s demand for natural gas, particularly in China which is striving to reduce its reliance on burning dirty coal for power. The International Energy Agency this month forecast that China’s consumption of natural gas is poised to quadruple from 130 billion cubic meters in 2011 to 545 billion cubic meters in 2035.
Unlike rival LNG suppliers in the Middle East, shipments to Asia from Papua New Guinea won’t pass through the Malacca Strait choke point near Singapore and freight charges are lower.
“We believe Horizon Oil has a commanding and material position in the liquids-rich sweet spot of the Papuan foreland basin and we have had strong interest in the sale from substantive LNG industry players,” Horizon Oil Chairman Fraser Ainsworth told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in Sydney.
A successful sale would balance Horizon’s oil and natural gas portfolio, which also includes producing and development assets in New Zealand and China, with financing for advancing its Papua New Guinea project, he said. It would also enable the company to firm up plans to pay dividends in future.
A person familiar with the matter said Horizon Oil had hired investment bank Lazard to lead the partial selldown of its Papua New Guinea assets. The company also owns a producing oil field in New Zealand, and is developing an oil project in southern China’s Beibu Gulf in partnership with Roc Oil and China’s Cnooc Ltd. that is due to start production early next year.
Horizon’s sale process comes just weeks after France’s Total made its first foray into Papua New Guinea through an exploration deal with Oil Search in the Gulf of Papua. Separately, Texas-based InterOil said Nov. 16 it expects to agree the sale of part of its interest in two fields and its Gulf LNG project in the country within weeks.
However, Papua New Guinea isn’t immune from headwinds such as currency swings buffeting its bigger neighbor Australia, where US$180 billion of investment is currently being plowed into gas-export projects and several more developments are on the drawing board.
Earlier this month ExxonMobil sa id the cost of its PNG LNG project in Papua New Guinea had blown out to US$19 billion, in part due to exchange-rate movements. It also blamed local landowner disputes and torrential rain for the overrun from its earlier budget of US$15.7 billion.
Analysts and investors seeking to put a value on Horizon’s assets will likely look to the acquisition by Japan’s Mitsubishi in February of stakes in several natural gas discoveries and prospects in Papua New Guinea from Canada’s Talisman Energy for US$280 million.
Talisman is a joint venture partner of Horizon Oil in the PRL 4 and PRL 21 tenements, which respectively contain the Stanley and Elevala/Ketu discoveries. Sydney-based Horizon owns 50% of PRL 4 and 45% of PRL 21, as well smaller stakes in two adjacent blocks.
However, the price tag for half of Horizon’s equity will have been boosted by the successful Ketu-2 well in PRL 21, recent reserves upgrades, and this year’s final investment decision taken on developing the Stanley field.
The Ketu field contains a mean contingent resource of 432 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 19.3 million barrels of condensate, Horizon said in a regulatory filing last month.
That adds to the estimated 434 billion cubic feet of gas and 24.6 million barrels of condensate at the Elevala field, with the joint venture now preparing to drill another prospect – Tingu – in the first half of next year.
Energy companies typically look for 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves for each million ton of annual LNG capacity they plan to build. When added to gas reserves discovered at Stanley, this suggests Horizon has already found enough gas to support a 1-million-ton-a-year LNG plant, while further drilling could see this capacity at least double in size.
“The increased gas volume–around 1.2 trillion cubic feet in PRLs 4 and 21 combined–is approaching the scale required for a mid-scale LNG project and we are advanced in our pre-feasibility studies of this opportunity,” the company said in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange on Oct. 12.
In July, Horizon said any LNG scheme could happen alongside current plans to recover condensate from the gas for early export via the Fly River.
Companies in China, Japan and South Korea that rely on LNG to plug a gap in their energy mix have been actively seeking equity in LNG projects as well as traditional offtake deals.
Citing a person familiar with the situation, Dow Jones Newswires reported Feb. 7 that Korea Gas is in talks to form a consortium with Mitsui and Japan Petroleum Exploration to join InterOil’s project in Papua New Guinea.

Researcher documents colourful birds-of-paradise

By MARY ESCH | AP

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A coffee table book and documentary by a Cornell Lab of Ornithology scientist and a National Geographic photographer provide a rare glimpse of the extravagant plumage and bizarre courtship dances of the rainforest birds known as birds-of-paradise.

Cornell's Ed Scholes and photographer Tim Laman made 18 expeditions to the remote rainforests of New Guinea over eight years. 

 A male blue bird-of-paradise forages in Papua New Guinea. Ed Scholes and Tim Laman made 18 expeditions to Papua New Guinea to document birds-of-paradise in the wild. (AP Photo/Tim Laman, National Geographic)

Their goal was to document for the first time all 39 species of birds-of-paradise in the wild with photos, audio recordings and video.

"Identification of species of birds-of-paradise has been going on for a long time because they're so beautiful," Scholes said.

"There's a good sampling of them in museums around the world from 19th century collectors who would go and shoot them or buy them from local people."

Most of the photographs of the birds were from captive birds in zoos.

Photographing them in the wild is challenging because of the rugged, hard-to-access areas where they live, and because many of the courtship displays happen high in the treetops.

Laman, an expert tree-climber, built platforms high in the rainforest to photograph those species.

Food is abundant and predators virtually non-existent in the New Guinea rainforest where birds-of-paradise evolved.

So the main driving force for evolution was sexual selection, said Scholes, whose primary interest is evolutionary biology.

The birds evolved with incredible colors and behaviors designed to attract mates.

 Some can change instantly into a flared-skirt dancer or a bouncing blob with luminous, blinking color patches. Some have long, ribbon-like head feathers, or waving, wire-like feathers tipped with shiny disks.

"My favorite would probably be the superb bird-of-paradise," Scholes said.

"I still look at it and find it too incredible to be true.

“The male transforms himself from a fairly recognizable black bird into something completely otherworldly, a black ovoid shape with what looks like two iridescent eye spots and a mouth — what I call a psychedelic smiley face."

Laman, who lives in Lexington, Mass., and maintains an academic affiliation with Harvard, where he got his doctorate in biology, said his favorite is the greater bird-of-paradise.

The male is stunning: maroon with a silver iridescent crown, blue bill and a cascade of brilliant yellow display feathers at its flanks.

But it's not the bird's beauty as much as its backstory that captivates Laman.

"We went to a remote place called the Aru Islands, where we were following in the footsteps of one of my real heroes, Alfred Russel Wallace," Laman said.

"He was a contemporary of Darwin who in the 1850s was exploring this area of Indonesia.

“He's known for discovering the same theory of natural selection as Darwin, and writing to him about it."

Laman and Scholes put more than 2,000 video clips and many audio files of birds-of-paradise in the Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. 

 The collection is available online.

A documentary on the project will air Thursday evening on the National Geographic Channel.

Links:

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Macaulay Library

National Geographic

Health reforms in PNG

Oxford Busines Group

Looking to make the most of the country’s resource revenues, Papua New Guinea  is planning to dip into the sovereign wealth fund to generate progress in the health and education sectors. 
However, current indicators suggest the administration faces an uphill battle.
On October 8, the minister of health, Michael Malabag, pledged to initiate important administrative and legislative reforms to improve the health care system, which has come under criticism in recent months from non-governmental organisations and observers.

Michael Malabag

After a meeting with Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, Malabag told media that his ministry plans to introduce free health care, set aside a K20 million  (US$9.7 million) allocation in the 2013 budget to combat tuberculosis, and step up a recruitment drive for professionals such as doctors, nurses and technical personnel. 
He also promised measures to combat the sale of fake pharmaceutical drugs and to improve the salaries of church health workers.
The reforms are part of Medium Term Development Plan and Strategic Implementation Plan. Eight "key result areas" have been identified as part of the K14.1 billion (US$6.8 billion) reform initiative, which is linked to the National Health Plan. 
These include improving services delivery, strengthening partnerships with stakeholders, tightening health systems and governance, advancing child survival and maternal health, and reducing communicable diseases.
The ministry will likely turn to the sovereign wealth fund (SWF), established in February to manage revenue from an expected resources boom, to fund the reforms. 
Rimbink Pato, the minister of foreign affairs and immigration, told the UN General Assembly in September that the boost the economy expects, particularly from the US$19 billion Exxon-led liquefied natural gas plant, would enable the country to improve social indicators such as literacy levels, maternal and infant mortality rates, as well as law enforcement.
The government is already studying the effect its spending so far has had on health and education. 
In October, Port Moresby launched a major education and health facility survey that will revisit schools and health centres surveyed 10 years ago in a joint PNG-based National Research Institute/World Bank effort. 
The aim is to see what effect the massive increase in government spending on health and education – from one-third of all spending 10 years ago to one-half today – has had over the past decade.
An early target for the SWF funds may be improving health provision outside towns.
 According to a recent report by Global Integrity, a non-profit organisation that tracks governance and corruption around the globe, “[Health care] problems in PNG are compounded by a decentralised and fragmented health care system, which has led to a lack of coordination and oversight of responsibilities between national and provincial/district government agencies, hospitals, health clinics and civil society organisations.”
Likely in an attempt to ease such fragmentation, in late October Malabag told parliament that a new Provincial Health Authorities Act of 2007 will allow for a "single and streamlined" health system to be established in the provinces, local media reported.
"This law will see public hospitals and provincial health services come under a single authority,” he said.
 “This reform will improve planning and coordination of health service delivery by having a single authority managing the human resources and finances in the provinces.”
In September, however, Australia-based AusAID noted the scale of the challenge, revealing in an annual report that PNG was off track on its Millennium Development Goals, and that its health and education indicators were the lowest in the Asia-Pacific region.
The country’s Human Development Index has fallen to 153 out of 187 countries in 2012 from 132 in 2003, with life expectancy just 62.8 years and adults attending an average of 4.3 years of school. 
As of 2011, infant mortality rates also averaged a record high 42.05 deaths per 1000.
However, the government is confident the SWF can make a difference, estimating that some K100 billion (US$48.5 billion) will be initially deposited. Malabag's reform plan will account for 27% of the government's overall recurrent budget to be allocated to the Health Department.
Education will also need much attention from the SWF funds. 
According to data from the PNG National Statistical Office, over one-third of school-aged youths have not received any form of formal education.
The treasury and finance departments have been told to release K500 million (US$242.5 million) for a free education programme announced in 2011, with tuition fees paid by the government for children up to year 10. 
 However, some critics say there were too many delays in ensuring subsidies reach the schools in time to make a difference for the 2013 school year, while others say that to be implemented correctly the government must provide more scholarships for student teachers.
Proper management of the SWF can indeed prove crucial in turning around PNG’s health and education sectors. 
As the government works out the specifics of where funding will be directed, the private sector’s assistance and expertise could also prove beneficial.