the LSI Group

786

The wealth manager forecasts that China and India would collectively contribute 40 percent to global growth for 2011 and 2012.

RANKS OF THE RICH BY 2015

The number of High Networth Individuals HNIs (1,000) and wealth of High Networth Individuals HNIs ($bln) by country:

• China 1378 – 8764
• India 403 – 2465
• Indonesia 99 – 487
• Philippines 38 – 164
• Thailand 128 – 609
• South Korea 310 – 1074
• Malaysia 68 – 329
• Taiwan 136 – 593
• Hong Kong 131 – 711
• Singapore 129 – 616
• Total 2820 – 15812

PHOTO: Models pose with a gold-plated Infiniti luxury sports car on display at a jewellery store in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu province on March 31, 2011. China is predicted to become the world’s largest luxury goods market by 2020, accounting for 44 percent of worldwide sales and bigger than the entire global market is now.  Read more about the 24k gold plated Infiniti G37 at topspeed.com

In a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks last year, there was mention of a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The document revealed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security considered this mine so vital that its “incapacitation or destruction … would have a debilitating impact” on U.S. security or the national economy. That’s because the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of cobalt, but mines none of it.

Now that is set to change. The first mine in the U.S. dedicated to producing cobalt will open in Idaho next year, reflecting the metal’s increasing importance in transportation, communication, and energy technologies. Cobalt is used in rechargeable batteries for wireless devices and hybrid vehicles, and in catalysts for refining gasoline. Half of the $440 million worth of cobalt consumed in the U.S. last year went into heat- and high-pressure-resistant “super-alloy” metals for aircraft engine compressors, combustion chambers, and turbines.

The U.S. has largely relied on imports of refined cobalt from China—the world’s leading producer—and from Norway, Russia, and Canada. (About one-fifth of the 10,000 tons of cobalt consumed in the U.S. in 2010 came from recycling scrap metal and spent catalysts.) China, besides its domestic supply, processes cobalt from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplied half of the 88,000 metric tons of cobalt mined in the world last year. (Zambia provided an additional 13 percent, with another 7 percent coming from Russia and China each.)

However, this geographic diversity masks the fact that much of the world’s supply—possibly one-third—is controlled by a single company, Switzerland-based Glencore and its subsidiaries. “We may be shifting our reliance on foreign oil into a reliance on foreign critical materials,” says Matthew Stepp, a clean-energy policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, D.C.

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The Indonesian Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) issued a press release today outlining a program of tax holidays to be granted to new investors via a decree of the Minister of Finance.

Important Features of the tax holiday:

• Offered for 5 to 10 years after a company or project begins commercial production
• 50% reduction offered for 2 years after the initial tax holiday ends
• Priority sectors:  basic metals, petroleum refineries, organic chemicals from petroleum or natural gas, machinery, renewable resources
• Other sectors are eligible if they support “national competitiveness” or are deemed to be “pioneer”industries
• Self assessment: The tax exemption must be applied for to BKPM or Ministry of Industry
• An interagency verification committee considers the application and the Ministry of Finances issues a tax holiday decision letter

Indonesia Investment Coordinating Board
Press Release
Government Issued Tax Holiday Regulation

Jakarta, August 22th 2011

After careful deliberation and much anticipation, the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia has officially issued Finance Ministry Regulation on Corporate Income Tax Exemption, often called the tax holiday, on  August  16th, 2011.

The tax holiday facility offers corporate income tax exemption for a period ranging from 5 to 10 years after a company or project begins commercial production. Following this period, the tax facility could offer an additional 50% (fifty percent) corporate income tax reduction for 2 (two) years after the tax holiday period. This facility could be extended through various considerations, including whether such business activity reinforces both strategic values and national interests, but is strictly under the Ministry of Finance’s discretion. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC News website has published an interactive page that shows the high level steps involved in building an offshore wind farm.

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August 10, 2011

Department of Energy Releases New ‘Billion-Ton’ Study Highlighting Opportunities for Growth in Bioenergy Resources

The U.S. Department of Energy today released a report – 2011 U.S. Billion-Ton Update: Biomass Supply for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry – detailing U.S. biomass feedstock potential nationwide. The report examines the nation’s capacity to produce a billion dry tons of biomass resources annually for energy uses without impacting other vital U.S. farm and forest products, such as food, feed, and fiber crops. The study provides industry, policymakers, and the agricultural community with county-level data and includes analyses of current U.S. feedstock capacity and the potential for growth in crops and agricultural products for clean energy applications. The biomass resources identified in the report could be used to produce clean, renewable biofuels, biopower, or bioproducts. For example, with continued developments in biorefinery capacity and technology, the feedstock resources identified could produce about 85 billion gallons of biofuels – enough to replace approximately 30% of the nation’s current petroleum consumption. This data will be used by both the public and private sector to grow the bioenergy industry and help achieve President Obama’s goals of dramatically expanding renewable energy resources and developing alternative fuels for America’s transportation sector.

“Developing the next generation of American biofuels and bioenergy will help diversify our energy portfolio, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and produce new clean energy jobs,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “This study identifies resources here at home that can help grow America’s bioenergy industry and support new economic opportunities for rural America.”

The report supports the conclusion of the original 2005 Billion-Ton Study with added in-depth production and costs analyses and sustainability studies. The 2011 report uses more rigorous models and data analysis to test the feasibility of increasing biomass production to help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs. The new report also conducts in-depth analyses of land-use changes and competition among food, feed, and energy crops. Read the rest of this entry »

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Fri, 08/12/2011

The Indonesian government is exploring effective instruments to encourage domestic coconut processing industry, an official says.

The Trade Ministry’s foreign trade director general discovered that imposing an export duty on coconuts, for copra, would not be effective to secure its supply for the domestic industry.

“We export less than 1 percent of our total outputs, or around 130 million, so an export duty would not be an appropriate solution to support the domestic processing industry,” he told reporters at his office. “Perhaps, we need to do something else like improve the distribution of coconuts.”

According to the ministry’s data, Indonesia produced 16.3 billion coconuts last year, 7.6 billion of which went to the domestic industry, mostly concentrated in Riau province.

Other areas with abundant coconut production are East Java, North Sulawesi and North Maluku provinces, which, however, still have a small number of coconut processing centers.

It’s the Holy Grail at clean energy research labs all over the world and something which could address long term energy issues domestically and beyond: more efficient photovoltaic solar. We’ve told you about scientists studying full-spectrum cells, usingtextured substrates, trying self-regenerating nanomaterials – we’ve even reported on an anti-reflective film inspired by a coating found in moth eyes. Now a Stanford team is claiming a breakthrough in making cheaper, more efficient panels by adding a single layer of organic molecules to solar cells.

The researchers studied this technique on a fairly new type of solar cell that uses tiny particles of semiconductors called quantum dots. Quantum dot solar cells are cheaper to produce than traditional silicon cells, but they haven’t caught on due to their relative inefficiency.

For Stacey Bent, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford, this represented something of a challenge. She knew that solar cells made of a single material have a maximum efficiency of about 31 percent, a limitation of the fixed energy level they can absorb, and that quantum dot solar cells didn’t share this limitation. “Quantum dots can be tuned to absorb a certain wavelength of light just by changing their size,” the Stanford report on her research says. “And they can be used to build more complex solar cells that have more than one size of quantum dot, allowing them to absorb multiple wavelengths of light.”

So Bent and her team coated a titanium dioxide semiconductor in their quantum dot solar cell with a very thin single layer of organic molecules. They found that just that single layer, less than a nanometer thick, was enough to triple the efficiency of the solar cells.

Even with this breakthrough, there’s still work to do: Bent said the cadmium sulfide quantum dots she’s been using aren’t ideal for solar cells, so her group plans to try other molecules for the organic layer, while also tinkering with the solar cell increase light absorption.

Her theory is, said Stanford, that once the sun’s energy creates an electron and a hole, the thin organic layer helps keep them apart, preventing them from recombining and being wasted. The group has yet to optimize the solar cells, and they have currently achieved an efficiency of, at most, 0.4 percent. But the group can tune several aspects of the cell, and once they do it is said, the threefold increase caused by the organic layer would be even more significant.

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