Indonesia at home and abroad: economics, politics and security

Overview: This inaugural suite of papers for the National Security College Issue Brief Series is also a component of an NSC research grant investigating the prospects, challenges and opportunities associated with Indonesia’s ascent in the political-security, economic, and socio-cultural spheres. The chief investigators for this project are Dr Christopher Roberts, Dr Ahmad Habir, and Associate Professor Leonard Sebastian. These issue briefs represent a short precursor to a fi fteen chapter edited book, titled Indonesia’s Ascent: Power, Leadership and the Regional Order, to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in late 2014. The project also involved conferences and fi eldwork in both Canberra and Jakarta between 2012 and 2013

The significance of point source emission (NO2) by petrochemical plants at North East of Peninsular Malaysia.

Petrochemical industry is one of the major pollutant generators around the world. The same scenario is observed occurring at North East of Peninsular Malaysia. The ISCT3 air dispersion of Gaussain Transport Model was used to simulate the average predicted on ground concentration of NO(2) emitted by point source from the petrochemicals plants. The simulation covers major input of geographical domain was set up, including NO(2) generators specification and meteorological parameters. The geographical domain set up is at 20 km x 20 km covering area centre of the petrochemicals plants with 0.5 km receptors grid spacing. The NO(2) emission rate was estimated through the use of ultimate fuel analysis method. The NO(2) generated combined with 5 yearly meteorological data obtained were applied to perform the simulation at the optimum correlation of wind direction. The simulation performed discovered that the predicted monthly and yearly average of on ground NO(2) concentration range from 13.97 to 20.43 ug/m(3) and 691 to 8.49 ug/m(3) respectively. The yearly predicted average concentration shows that the value is below the WHO guideline which is at 40 ug/m(3). No benchmark could be performed at the monthly average since there is no standard guideline available

Optimization of remote meteorological parameters in predicting the air pollutant (NO2) distribution by Petrochemical Industry along Coastal Zone at East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia.

As commonly observed throughout the world, the meteorological parameters at coastal area are influenced by both rotation of wind direction and sea breezes wind vectors features. Theoretically, this atmospheric condition describes difficulties in predicting on ground concentration of pollutant using the acceptable method of dispersion under the turbulence properties. This research applies the air dispersion modeling using ISCT3 software in order to predict on ground concentration of NO2 from selected petrochemical plants in Kertih, Terengganu, located at North East of Peninsular Malaysia Meteorological data of year 2008 obtained from the Kuala Terengganu Meteorology Station was used as input to the ISCT3 software. This meteorology station is located approximately 95 km north-west off the study site which contains the pollutant sources and verification point. The modeling domains covered a 20 x 20 km2 area centre of the petrochemical industry with grid spacing of 500 meter each as dummy receptors. During verification process, the significance improvement through the optimization analysis of wind direction proven that the correlation coefficient of predicted over the actual NO2 concentration improve from 0.68 to 0.91. The average maximum monthly and yearly on ground concentration NO2 obtained is at 13.97 ug/m3 and 6.91 ug/m3 respectively. The annual value is much below the Malaysian and WHO guidelines which is at 90 ug/m3 and 40 ug/m3 respectively. No benchmarking could be gauged on the monthly value since no guideline is available