Norway's wealth fund earns 131 billion euros in first half

OSLO, Norway - Oil producer Norway's sovereign wealth fund earned 131 billion euros in the first half of the year, the country's central bank said on Tuesday.

The performance, lifted by the financial markets, represented a return of 10 percent and helped boost the fund's value to 15,299 billion kroner (1,332 billion euros) at the end of June.

In six months, the fund has almost wiped out the huge 1,637 billion kroner loss incurred last year as a result of the war in Ukraine and the global economic downturn.

Norway's wealth fund is the world's biggest, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, just ahead of two Chinese funds.

Fuelled by revenues from Norway's state-owned oil and gas companies, the fund is aimed at financing future spending in the generous welfare state.

Since the start of the year, the vast fund has also benefited from the weakening of the krone, which has increased the value of assets held in dollars, euros and other foreign currencies.

In total, the fund's value increased by 2,870 billion kroner over the first six months of the year.

Norges Bank had been set to publish the half-year results on Wednesday, but they were mistakenly sent to the media late Tuesday.

Agence France-Presse

Fire on oil tankers at S.Korean port injures 10

SEOUL/OSLO - A fire that spread across two oil tankers in a South Korean port injured 10 people on Saturday, coastguard and fire officials said, adding the blaze had largely been put out.

An explosion occurred on the Stolt Groenland, a 25,000-tonne, Cayman Island-flagged oil tanker, at the southern port of Ulsan at around 10:50 a.m. (0150 GMT), a coastguard official said.

There were 25 sailors aboard, including Russians and Filipinos.

The fire spread to another oil tanker docked nearby, the 9,000-tonne, South Korean-flagged Bow Dalian, with 21 aboard, he said.

All of the sailors on both ships were rescued, but 10 people, most of whom were workers at the terminal, have been wounded so far, a fire official told Reuters. Nine of them were South Korean, including one in a critical condition, and the other was from India.

"The fire has largely been put out but we are checking inside the vessels if there are any flames left or smoke coming out," the first official said.

Any impact on the terminal's output or the surrounding environment appears minimal for now as the ships were at the port for repair, he added.

The Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the incident, officials said.

Stolt Tankers, a unit of Oslo-listed Stolt-Nielsen which owns the first ship, expressed concern about the incident.

"The safety of all people on-site and the protection of the environment is paramount to the company's operations," it said in a statement.

Norway's Odfjell, which owns the other vessel, Bow Dalian, said the ship had been towed to safety and its crew accounted for.

"One of our crew members is undergoing treatment for light injuries stemming from the fire," Odfjell spokeswoman Anngun Dybsland said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Coral reefs at risk of dissolving as oceans get more acidic: study

OSLO - Coral reefs could start to dissolve before 2100 as man-made climate change drives acidification of the oceans, scientists said on Thursday.

Acidification will threaten sediments that are building blocks for reefs. Corals already face risks from ocean temperatures, pollution and overfishing.

"Coral reefs will transition to net dissolving before end of century," the Australian-led team of scientists wrote in the U.S. journal Science. "Net dissolving" means reefs would lose more material than they gain from the growth of corals.

Carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas, forms a weak acid in water and threatens to dissolve the reef sediments, made from broken down bits of corals and other carbonate organisms that accumulate over thousands of years, it said.

The sediments are 10 times more vulnerable to acidification than the tiny coral animals that also extract chemicals directly from the sea water to build stony skeletons that form reefs, the study said.

Coral animals will be able to keep growing and replenish reefs long after sandy sediments start to dissolve, lead author Bradley Eyre, of Southern Cross University, told Reuters.

"This probably reflects the corals' ability to modify their environment and partially adapt to ocean acidification whereas the dissolution of sands is a geo-chemical process that cannot adapt," he wrote in an e-mail.

The report said it was "unknown if the whole reef will erode once the sediments become net dissolving" and whether reefs "will experience catastrophic destruction" or merely a slow erosion.

Some reef sediments were already starting to dissolve, such as at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii, where other pollutants were contributing.

Eyre said it was unclear if the dissolution of sediments could be a long-term threat to entire islands, from the Pacific to the Caribbean. Other studies say that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can limit acidification.

Most studies show that acidification will be overwhelmingly bad for ocean life, also threatening creatures such as oysters, lobsters and crabs. Another study on Thursday, however, found that it might help the growth of some plants.

"An increase of carbon dioxide in the ocean theoretically could stimulate higher growth of kelp and seaweeds," Kasper Hancke, a biologist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, wrote in a statement.

source: news.abs-cbn.com