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Friday 28 October 2011
Wednesday 26 October 2011
China Takes a Loss to Get Ahead in the Business of Fresh Water
Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
A fisherman at a seawater canal, near a cooling tower of the desalination plant in Tianjin, China.
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: October 25, 2011
TIANJIN, China — Towering over the Bohai Sea shoreline on this city’s outskirts, the Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant is a 26-billion-renminbi technical marvel: an ultrahigh-temperature, coal-fired generator with state-of-the-art pollution controls, mated to advanced Israeli equipment that uses its leftover heat to distill seawater into fresh water.
A desalination industry has grown in cities near Beijing.
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Times Topic: China and the Environment
The Beijiang plant, one of two, supplies an expanding suburb with 10,000 tons of desalted water daily, with plans to someday pump 180,000 tons. A second 100,000-ton facility supplies a vast ethylene production plant outside of town.
The Beijiang plant has faced some hiccups. The mineral-free distilled water scrubs rust from city pipes en route to taps, turning the water brown. Some residents are suspicious of the water, saying its purity means it lacks nutrients. The plant is addressing both complaints by adding minerals to the water.
But some say slaking China’s thirst may be a beneficial sideline to larger aims. The global market for desalination technology will more than quadruple by 2020 to about $50 billion a year, the research firm SBI Energy predicted last month, and growing water shortages worldwide appear to ensure further growth.
Beyond that, the increasingly sophisticated membrane technologies that filter salt from seawater can be applied to sewage treatment, pollution control and a legion of other cutting-edge uses. Far outpaced now by foreign membrane producers, which command at least 85 percent of the market, China is set on developing its own advanced technologies.
Some experts say that is where the government’s interest mostly lies. “What this is about is developing China’s membrane industry, more than it is local use,” said Ms. Jensen, the Singapore analyst. “This is an export industry fundamentally, not one to make a green China.”
Whatever the motivation, China is already racing toward meeting its targets.
Just as foreign companies rushed to China to secure a place in its budding wind-energy market, the list of foreign companies that have plunged into China’s desalination industry is long: Hyflux of Singapore, Toray of Japan, Befesa of Spain, Brack of Israel and ERI of the United States, among others.
And just as foreigners shifted solar-energy research and production to China, desalination companies are leaving their home bases as well. The Norwegian company Aqualyng is a partner with the Beijing city government on a desalination plant in Tangshan, a coastal city about 135 miles east of Beijing, and is studying moving its manufacturing facilities from Europe to China.
ERI, which is based in San Francisco and claims to have the desalination industry’s most advanced technology, is moving research facilities to China and is considering moving manufacturing as well at some later date.
Most of the foreign companies have partnered with state-owned corporations, for help in securing business and for political protection in a country where the rule of law and protection of intellectual property are in a state of flux. And although some foreign investors in technology-laden projects like wind energy and high-speed rail later claimed their Chinese partners appropriated their technologies, the heads of ERI and Aqualyng say they can become researchers and manufacturers in China without losing control of their products.
The chairman of Aqualyng’s board, Bernt Osthus, said in an interview that the company’s partnership with the Beijing government had been “close to an ideal partner,” with the Norwegians controlling the technology and the Chinese providing money and local know-how.
He added, however, that the company was considering a joint research venture with a Chinese partner.
“By reducing our ownership in our equipment and taking on a state-owned Chinese partner and moving production from Europe to China, the technology effectively becomes Chinese,” he said. “I’m still the owner. I’m still owning my piece of the pie. I’m just increasing the size of the pie.”
And a big pie it is.
“There are large-scale desalination projects centralized all up and down the east coast of China,” ERI’s chief executive officer, Thomas S. Rooney Jr., said in an interview. “Our company has the most advanced technology in the entire desalination industry. And one of the beautiful things about China is that they like to adopt the most advanced technologies.”
“You can either fight them or join them, and our philosophy is that China likely is going to be the next big desalination market,” he added. “I would rather develop technology for China in China and take a more open approach than play the secrets game.”
There is but one wrinkle in the $4 billion plant: The desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for. Nevertheless, the owner of the complex, a government-run conglomerate called S.D.I.C., is moving to quadruple the plant’s desalinating capacity, making it China’s largest.
“Someone has to lose money,” Guo Qigang, the plant’s general manager, said in a recent interview. “We’re a state-owned corporation, and it’s our social responsibility.”
In some places, this would be economic lunacy. In China, it is economic strategy.
As it did with solar panels and wind turbines, the government has set its mind on becoming a force in yet another budding environment-related industry: supplying the world with fresh water.
The Beijiang project, southeast of Beijing, will strengthen Chinese expertise in desalination, fine-tune the economics, help build an industrial base and, along the way, lessen a chronic water shortage in Tianjin. That money also leaks away like water — at least for now — is not a prime concern.
“The policy drivers are more important than the economic drivers,” said Olivia Jensen, an expert on Chinese water policy and a director at Infrastructure Economics, a Singapore-based consultancy. “If the central government says desalination is going to be a focus area and money should go into desalination technology, then it will.”
The government has, and it is. At the government’s order, China is rapidly becoming one of the world’s biggest growth markets for desalted water. The latest goal is to quadruple production by 2020, from the current 680,000 cubic meters, or 180 million gallons, a day to as many as three million cubic meters, about 800 million gallons, equivalent to nearly a dozen more 200,000-ton-a-day plants like the one being expanded in Beijiang.
China’s latest five-year plan for the sector is expected to order the establishment of a national desalination industry, according to Guo Yozhi, who heads the China Desalination Association. Institutes in at least six Chinese cities are researching developments in membranes, the technology at the core of the most sophisticated and cost-effective desalination techniques.
The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top-level state planning agency, is drafting plans to give preferential treatment to domestic companies that build desalting equipment or patent desalting technologies. There is talk of tax breaks and low-interest loans to encourage domestic production.
In an interview, Mr. Guo called the government role in desalination “symbolic,” saying that direct government investment in seawater projects does not exceed 10 percent of their cost. By comparison, he said, big water ventures like the massive South-North Water Diversion Project, which will divert water from the Yangtze River in the south to the thirsty north, are completely government-financed.
Still, the government’s plans could mean an investment of as much as 200 billion renminbi, or about $31 billion, by state-owned companies, government agencies and private partners.
Beijiang’s desalination complex, built by S.D.I.C. at the behest of the Development and Reform Commission as a concept project, was almost wholly made in Israel, shipped to Tianjin and bolted together. Nationally, less than 60 percent of desalination equipment and technology is domestic.
China’s goal is to raise that to 90 percent by 2020, said Jennie Peng, an analyst and water industry specialist at the Beijing office of Frost & Sullivan, a consulting company based in San Antonio.
There are plenty of reasons for China to want a homegrown desalination industry, not the least of which is homegrown fresh water. Demand for water here is expected to grow 63 percent by 2030 — gallon for gallon, more than anywhere else on earth, according to the Asia Water Project, a business information organization.
Northern China has long been short of water, and fast-expanding cities like Beijing and Tianjin already have turned to extensive recycling and conservation programs to meet the need.
Panel Endorses HPV Vaccine for Boys of 11
Boys and young men should be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, to protect against anal and throat cancers that can result from sexual activity, a federal advisory committee said Tuesday.
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Health Guide: HPV Vaccine
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The recommendation by the panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is likely to transform the use of the HPV vaccine, since most private insurers pay for vaccines once the committee recommends them for routine use. The HPV vaccine is unusually expensive. Its three doses cost pediatricians more than $300, and pediatricians often charge patients hundreds more.
The committee recommended that boys ages 11 and 12 should be vaccinated. It also recommended vaccination of males ages 13 through 21 who had not already had all three shots. Vaccinations may be given to boys as young as 9 and to men between the ages of 22 and 26.
The committee recommended in 2006 that girls and young women ages 11 to 26 should be vaccinated, but vaccination rates in the United States have so far been disappointing.
The vaccine has been controversial because the disease it prevents results from sexual activity, and that controversy is likely to intensify with the committee’s latest recommendation since many of the cancers in men result from homosexual sex. The HPV vaccine became a source of contention among Republican presidential candidates after some candidates criticized Gov. Rick Perry of Texas for trying to require that girls in his state be vaccinated. Representative Michele Bachmann falsely suggested that the vaccine causes mental retardation.
But for the public health experts gathered in Atlanta, the vaccine’s remarkable effects were irresistible.
“This is cancer, for Pete’s sake,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department ofpreventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a nonvoting member of the committee. “A vaccine against cancer was the dream of our youth.”
HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease — between 75 percent and 80 percent of females and males in the United States will be infected at some point in their lives. Most will overcome the infection with no ill effects. But in some people, infections lead to cellular changes that cause warts or cancer, including cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in women and anal cancers in men and women. A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex.
HPV infections cause about 15,000 cancers in women and 7,000 cancers in men each year. And while cervical cancer rates have plunged over the past four decades because of widespread screening, anal cancer rates in men and women have been increasing. Head and neck cancers have also been increasing, with the share associated with HPV infection increasing rapidly — perhaps because oral sex has increased in popularity.
Parents of boys face some uncomfortable realities when choosing whether to have their child vaccinated. The burden of disease in males results mostly from oral or anal sex, but vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.
Vaccinating the nation’s 11- and 12-year-old boys will cost almost $140 million annually, but the one-time catch-up among males 13 to 21 will cost hundreds of millions more. The government generally pays for about half of all vaccinations.
The committee has become increasingly concerned about the cost effectiveness of vaccines, since the newest vaccines tend to be very expensive while protecting against diseases that affect fewer people. Vaccinating boys is cost effective when vaccination rates in girls are relatively low, which they are now. Fewer than half of girls between the ages of 13 and 17 have received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine, and fewer than a third have received all three doses.
Only about 1 percent of boys have received the HPV vaccine, even though the vaccine advisory committee has said that boys could be vaccinated against the disease if they or their parents wished.
Vaccinating homosexual boys would be far more cost effective than vaccinating all boys, since the burden of disease is far higher in homosexuals. “But it’s not necessarily effective or perhaps even appropriate to be making those determinations at the 11- to 12-year-old age,” said Kristen R. Ehresmann of the Minnesota Department of Health and a committee member.
Dr. S. Michael Marcy, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California and a committee member, said that the money needed to vaccinate 11- and 12-year-old boys would pay for only a few hours of the war in Afghanistan while potentially saving thousands of lives in the United States.
“I’m constantly being told we don’t have the money. Well, we do have the money,” Dr. Marcy said. “We need a new set of priorities, and we if we don’t set those priorities, who will?”
The vaccine loses effectiveness if it is given after the onset of sexual activity. More than one in five boys and girls have had vaginal sex by the age of 15, surveys show. But there are many strains of HPV, and Gardasil — the HPV vaccine manufactured by Merck — protects against four of those strains. Older boys and young men may receive the vaccine even after becoming sexually active in hopes that it might protect them against an HPV strain they have yet to encounter.
Separately, the advisory committee voted to recommend routine vaccination of diabetics under age 60 against hepatitis B infections, which commonly occur in older diabetics in long-term care facilities where blood sugar levels are checked using unsanitary methods. Diabetics 60 and older may get vaccinated as well, but the panel recommended vaccines only for those under 60 because that is when immune systems respond best to vaccination.
For HPV, the committee voted 8 to 5, with one abstention, to approve a recommendation that males 13 to 21 be vaccinated, with those voting against the recommendation hoping to make the upper age limit 26. Vaccinating men ages 22 to 26 is expensive and is likely to provide relatively few health benefits.
“The bottom line is that not all kids start having sex when they’re 13. Mine didn’t, I promise you,” Dr. Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and a committee member, said to laughter from the audience.
Not only are the committee’s recommendations routinely used by private insurers to determine which vaccines to pay for, but the health reform legislation of 2010 requires insurers that participate in health exchanges to offer vaccines that are routinely recommended by the committee.
Pujols Won’t Find Unconditional Love Elsewhere
Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Sometime soon, Pujols is going to have to choose where he wants to play for the rest of his career.
By GEORGE VECSEY
Published: October 26, 2011
St. Louis
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It's not hard to imagine a statue of Pujols with bat in hand outside Busch Stadium.
How much is enough?
This is something Albert Pujols is going to have to figure out before he decides whether he wants to remain a Cardinal or move on to a richer and, dare I say it, more demanding market.
Pujols was facing possibly the last game of his contract and of hisCardinals career as this grand old baseball city awaited Game 6 of the World Series on Wednesday.
Any way the Series ends, Pujols is sure to finish this week, this season, with the roaring adoration of the fans in the only town he has known. He will be ending his 11th season as a superstar who has hit three home runs in one World Series game (Saturday) and been walked intentionally three times and given the liberty to put on a doomed hit-and-run play (Monday).
Sometime in the next weeks and months, Pujols is going to have to choose where he wants to play for the rest of his career. He has turned down a contract said to be for nine years and about $200 million.
He is a logical man who has to know this one central fact: no town will ever love him more as a great player and, by all appearances, a steadfast charitable and religious family man.
It will never be easier for Pujols to be the person he is — which includes private, taciturn, perhaps even distant — than in this city, which adores its heroes. St. Louis never made demands that Stan Musial ever be anything more than the gracious hey-hey-whattaya-say superstar next door.
The legion of elders who saw Musial play from 1941 to 1963 maintain that he would have higher recognition today as a career .331 hitter if he had played in a coastal city like New York, Boston or Los Angeles. What is overlooked is that the East Coast media hectored Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in ways large and small — in a kinder and gentler time before the 24-hour gnawing of the carpenter ants of blog land and Twitter land.
Pujols may not be prepared to be the $300 million savior of a rich franchise. Who is? After a bad second game here, he vanished into the night, to the team bus or wherever, without dropping a few words to sate the news media. Later he said that he did not know anybody would want to talk to him, which just does not calibrate. Derek Jeter gives nothing away — nothing — but he shows up, says his controlled piece, and moves on.
The crumbling Alex Rodriguez, serving out the last six years of the worst contract in baseball history — as much as $300 million over 10 years — often makes things worse for himself in ways Pujols never would. After taxes, Pujols would still be able to do wonderful things for children with Down syndrome and all his admirable causes.
Pujols is a civic hero in St. Louis. Undoubtedly, Harry Weber, the sculptor who made the10 vital statues that bristle with life in the outdoor corner of Eighth and Clark, has made mental sketches of how he would portray Pujols. The poses vary — Cool Papa Bell, the St. Louisan who never got to the majors because of segregation, is rounding a base; good old Red Schoendienst is airborne, making the pivot at second base. Pujols surely would be depicted with bat in hand.
I visited the sculpture area on Tuesday, when the temperature was still 80 degrees. (It was expected to drop by half by Wednesday evening.) James Rooks from Myrtle Beach, S.C., who had a ticket for the sixth game, was asked where the eventual Pujols statue would be placed. “Maybe in the bathroom,” he said. “Depends on whether he signs with them.”
Rooks said he understood a great player would want to make as much as he could, “but he’ll make more in one year than most of us make in a lifetime.” Asked about the free agency that ballplayers gained after the Curt Flood suit (Flood is not included in the sculpture garden, oddly enough), Rooks said, “If I told my boss I was testing free agency, he’d say, ‘Fine, don’t come back.’ “
Should Pujols move on? “He should go to the Astros,” said a woman who was inspecting the statues. Turned out, she was from Texas, still smarting over the moon shot Pujols hit off Brad Lidge in 2005.
The Cardinals management is playing the game its own way. On Monday General Manager John Mozeliak said about Pujols: “There’s no doubt he’s been the identity of this organization for the past decade, and trying to push just one button or try to say you’re not going to feel that loss would be very difficult to say, especially in this environment.”
Cardinals fans have been imploring Pujols with standing ovations and chants and banners and probably even prayers. On Wednesday he was down to a game or two. It was on everybody’s mind.
Tony La Russa, explaining on Tuesday why Pujols had the freedom to call the backfired hit-and-run in Game 5, volunteered, “I think I’ve said over and over again that for the 11 years that we’ve been together, Albert has proven every year, virtually every day of the season and postseason, he is a great player, not just a great producer, he’s a very smart baseball player.”
Asked if it was on his mind that this could be the last game for Pujols as a Cardinal, La Russa, himself unsigned, said: “Well, yeah, you have a lot of time to think about your team. And over the course of the rush at the end of the season into the postseason, I have thought about Albert’s situation because he’s a teammate, and I care a lot about him personally and professionally.”
Pujols, true to his code, addressed his free agency when spring training opened, and has not revisited it since. Asked about his status the other day, Pujols said: “Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about baseball.”
Fair enough. But in weeks to come, Pujols needs to remind himself — if his agents and advisers do not — that money is not everything.
Airlines’ Holiday Tidings
AS the holidays approach, many people are finalizing their travel plans and bracing themselves for the usual crowds, long security lines and inevitable delays.
Victo Ngai
This season, planes will be even more tightly packed as airlines continue to cut capacity through the end of the year and into the next, even as more passengers take to the skies. But thicker crowds aren’t the only differences that holiday travelers can expect this year. Some changes, including modified security screenings for children, will be welcome, others won’t.
Below, some of the most notable changes that have been introduced over the last 12 months, as well as a few new options to help avoid long lines and luggage fees.
Airport Security
The big news this holiday season is that children 12 and under can leave their shoes on when going through security. The policy change, which began as part of a test in August by the Transportation Security Administration and became official last month, also curtails, though doesn’t completely eliminate, pat-downs of children. Now, children may be sent through detectors or image machines multiple times or hand swabs may be used to check for traces of explosives, in lieu of a pat-down.
Adults must still go through the usual drill of removing shoes, jackets, belts and watches; taking out laptops and cellphones; and making sure their 3.4-ounce tubes of toothpaste and shaving gel are safely sealed in a quart-size plastic bag.
The T.S.A. has also installed new software on certain body scanners designed to improve privacy by replacing the virtual nude images of passengers, previously used, with a generic, computer-generated outline. Passengers are now able to view the same image online that the security officer sees on a computer screen as they pass through security.
This fall the T.S.A. plans to test the same software on full-body X-ray scanners, which still use actual images of passengers that show the contours of the body and reveal foreign objects. Currently, there are nearly 510 imaging scanners at some 90 airports nationwide, with additional units planned for later this year.
Passengers willing to pay for access to expedited security lines will find that more airlines are offering the service as an add-on. In June, JetBlue introduced Even More Speed, which offers passengers who, depending on the flight, pay $10 to $65 extra for a seat with more legroom, as well as a spot in an expedited security line at 15 airports, including Newark Liberty, San Francisco and Kennedy. United has been selling expedited security and preboarding (from $9) for a couple of years now.
And American has been expanding its Five Star Service program to more airports including Boston and San Francisco, which offers expedited security lines along with other V.I.P. services like lounge access, preboarding and assistance with things like check-in, bags and airport connections for $125 a person.
Boarding
Compounding confusion at the gate, a couple of airlines have changed their boarding procedures this year. American, which used to board back to front, now randomly assigns travelers without elite status to boarding groups. Coach passengers can buy their way into the first group, behind first class and elite frequent fliers, for $10. The carrier says the revised process, which it introduced in May, has improved boarding times 5 to 10 percent and reduced the number of bags checked at the gate.
United, which had switched to boarding by row from back to front, returned to window-middle-aisle boarding zones this summer. It will switch its Continental Airlines unit, which boards back-to-front, to window-middle-aisle next year.
Fees for Checked Bags
Prepaying for checked bags online this season? Don’t expect a discount. Airlines like Delta, United and Continental that used to knock $2 to $5 off for prepayments eliminated those price reductions, bringing the cost for checking one bag on many domestic flights to $25, and $35 for the second, whether they are paid in advance or not. To avoid paying those fees, some passengers have been lugging more belongings onto already crowded planes — and will no doubt continue to do so over the holidays. JetBlue still offers the first checked bag free and Southwest still offers two.
Travelers who try to avoid the carry-on mess by stuffing holiday gifts in checked bags may be caught off guard by increased fees for excess luggage. “In some cases the fees are shockingly high,” said George Hobica, founder of Airfarewatchdog.com. In March, for example, United doubled fees for overweight luggage weighing 71 to 99.9 pounds to $400 each way for bags on most international routes, up from $200, and $200 on domestic routes, from $100.
Oversize bags on United measuring more than 62 linear inches are now $200 extra on international routes, up from $100 previously. Similarly, US Airways now charges $175 each way for overweight bags from 71 to 100 pounds on most international flights, up from $120, according to industry experts.
Some airlines also added or increased fees for a second checked bag on international routes. Delta recently began charging $60 each way for a second checked bag (if paid online) for flights between the United States and South America, Asia, India, Australia andNew Zealand. In February, American began charging $30 each way for a second bag between the United States and the Caribbean and Central America.
New Credit Card Perks
One way to improve your airport experience and decrease luggage fees is to sign up for a new credit card, as more card issuers are offering a wider range of benefits. Just last month, Delta added priority boarding and 20 percent off in-flight food, beverages and movies to the range of perks it offers Gold and Platinum Delta SkyMiles American Express card holders. The card, which comes with an annual $95 fee, had already included the first checked bag free for up to eight traveling companions.
In July, Chase introduced the United MileagePlus Explorer Card, which includes priority boarding, two United airport club passes a year, the first checked bag free and other benefits for a $95 annual fee. Also in July, Citibank introduced the American Airlines-branded Citi Executive AAdvantage World Elite MasterCard, with a roster of perks, including lounge access, expedited security and priority boarding and free checked bags, for a $450 annual fee. And this year, American Express added some perks for Platinum Card holders who pay annual fees of $450; benefits include Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide (normally $249 for 10 visits), and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for preapproved travelers entering the United States. The card also offers $200 a year in reimbursements for airline fees.
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