Background

Nautilus Institute is pleased to announce the “Asian Energy Security Project Meeting 2007”, to be held in Beijing, China, from the 31st of October to the 2nd of November, 2007. The Asian Energy Security Project Meeting is being organized by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability of San Francisco, California in collaboration with the Beijing Energy Training Center (BETC) at Tsinghua University.

In keeping with the theme of the ongoing Asian Energy Security (AES) Project the meeting will emphasize collaborative research, involving groups from each of the countries of Northeast Asia (including, the DPRK, the ROK, the Russian Far East, China, Japan, and Mongolia) on different paths to address energy security issues in the region. This year the Project will expand its focus to also include energy experts from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Australia.

Collaborative research under the AES project looks at on both national and regional approaches to energy security concerns. A main focus of the AES 2007 project meeting will be on different “paths” for nuclear power development in those countries in the region where nuclear power is used, including paths where future development of nuclear generation capacity is at “minimum” and “maximum” plausible levels. Ramifications of nuclear energy choices for national and regional nuclear fuel-cycle arrangements will also be discussed.

Given, as in previous AES project meetings, that participants from across Northeast and Southeast, as well as the United States and Australia, are expected, the meeting will provide an excellent opportunity for an informal exchange of views.

The AES project meeting will start, as in previous years, with a day of updates from participants on the overall energy, energy policy, and energy security situations in their countries, as well as updates on their work in modeling different energy futures (including paths that include regional energy cooperation strategies) for their country using the energy/environmental analysis software tool (LEAP more information available at:www.energycommunity.org) that all groups have been working with. The second and third days will focus on special project topics, including discussions of future energy paths, nuclear fuel-cycle issues, and planning for future collaborative project activities.

This work will draw and build upon work in previous Asian Energy Security (AES) and East Asia Energy Futures (EAEF) project workshops held in Beijing (co-hosted by the Energy and Environmental Technology Center at Tsinghua University), in Canada (Co-hosted by the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues) and at Nautilus Institute in California.

To request further information, comment on this document, or to ask a question about the Nautilus Institute’s Asian Energy Security Project please e-mail: Scott@nautilus.org