Welcome to Issue Qtr 2 2009

buzz stop

Goodbye and Hello...

In this edition we have two goodbyes, a hello and a well-done to say. Goodbye and farewell to two long-serving members of staff - June Sullivan and Dave Underwood - who have both retired in the last two months after being with Strata from its early days. We hope that both June and David have long and happy retirements. Hello and welcome to Natasha Porter (pictured left, below), who joined Strata in January to take over June’s role as Strata’s Technical Administrator on behalf of BP at their Sunbury site; and well done to David Potter (right, below), who has successfully completed his probationary period and whose talents as an electronics engineer are rapidly gaining recognition both within the organisation and by its customers.

pipeline

’Smart Water‘ May Help Boost Production From Oil Wells

Researchers in Norway report that injecting a special type of seawater dubbed "smart water" into certain low-yield oil wells may help boost oil extraction by as much as 60 percent. "Smart water" is seawater formulated with sulfates and other substances to improve its ability to penetrate limestone. Exploratory studies have shown that using "smart water" leads to the same fundamental chemical reactions that occur in chalk, whose reservoir characteristics are well known. The study could help meet rising energy demands and provide consumers with some financial relief at the petrol pump in the future, the scientists suggest.
http://www.peakoil.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=42511

Cashing in on natural hydrate inhibitors?

Operators of subsea fields on the continental shelf spend huge sums on combating insidious ice-like hydrate crystals, but a chemical jigsaw puzzle that is being pieced together in SINTEF is at last offering hope of a less expensive means of protection against hydrate blockages. It seems that hydrates simply do not aggregate and cause problems in the presence of some types of oil, whilst with others they do, and the task is to find out why. The answer could mean big savings to oil producers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427075416.htm

Green machine

Active Drag Reduction Improves Fuel Economy

At a time when road fuel prices are almost as high as they have even been, the pressure is on to make more efficient use of energy supplies. A mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis is developing a technique using Active Flow Controls (AFC) that could reduce the drag of vehicles by around 15% and cut fuel consumption. The idea behind AFC is to deploy actuators on the surface of vehicles to modify the flow in a way that the overall resistance is reduced. Computational fluid dynamics software has been used to show that actuators can modify the flow to reduce drag, which in turn reduces the amount of fuel needed. If widely employed, AFC technology could play an important role in fuel conservation and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

http://www.huliq.com/11/78565/engineer-devises-ways-improve-gas-mileage

Imitating nature - taking CO2 from the air

From villain to hero - could the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere be the raw material for carbon compounds in the future? If plants can do it, why can’t we? Researchers working at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have now developed a novel reaction scheme by which CO2 can be efficiently converted into methanol under very mild conditions. Methanol is an important starting material for many chemical syntheses and serves as an alternative fuel and as a raw material for the production of energy in methanol fuel cells.

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=125051

The tide’s out - put the kettle on

Engineers at the University of Liverpool claim that building estuary barrages in the North West could provide more than 5% of the UK’s electricity. Researchers examined various ways of generate electricity from tidal sources of renewable energy in the Eastern Irish Sea. The study showed that four estuary barrages, across the Solway Firth, Morecambe Bay and the Mersey and Dee estuaries, could be capable of meeting approximately half of the North West UK region’s electricity needs, and that the most effective mode of generating electricity was ’ebb generation‘, which involves collecting water as the tide comes in and releasing the water back through turbines once the tide has gone out. Tidal electricity generation could also help to achieve the UK’s CO2 emission reduction targets.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325092203.htm

Gleanings

How to prevent a ‘collapse’ in oil revenues

Scientists at the University of Stavanger in Norway are close to solving the mystery surrounding the collapsing of chalk reservoirs. Subsidence had been reported in the Ekofisk reservoir in the North Sea as early as 1984, but fifteen years later expectations that the rate of subsidence would decrease were still being confounded. A shift of focus away from physical phenomena to the chemical process of ‘water weakening’ now appears to hold the answer. Following experimental observations performed in the lab, the scientists are now developing a completely new model for calculating the water weakening effect, based on chemical equations. This mathematical model will enable the scientists to predict how the injection of seawater dissolves the chalk, and they hope to use it to determine what water mixtures could best prevent the chalk structure from collapsing. Of keen interest to the oil majors, this work could be worth billions in enhanced oil recovery. One to chalk up to the scientists...

http://esciencenews.com/sources/science.daily/2009/04/24/solving.the.chalk.mystery.to.generate.billions.in.additional.income.for.oil.industry

I’ll have a glass of electrical energy, please...

Well, not quite, but types of glass are being developed that could increase the storage density of electrical capacitors significantly. Materials researchers at Penn State University have reported the highest known breakdown strength for a bulk glass ever measured. Breakdown strength, along with dielectric constant, determines how much energy can be stored in an insulating material before it fails and begins to conduct electricity. The researchers believe that the energy density could be pushed up almost fourfold in comparison with typical dielectric materials. Possible applications include storage capacitors in fuel-cell powered vehicles and voltage-smoothing components.

http://www.pennsylvaniaagconnection.com/story-state.php?Id=336

Nuclear waste storage? It’s a gas...

The safe storage of spent nuclear fuel is of critical concern to any nation using nuclear power, but in Sweden they believe they have an answer in a recently discovered phenomenon known as the hydrogen effect. Research carried out by Patrick Fors, a doctoral candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, indicates that the presence of hydrogen suppresses any tendency of a variety of nuclear fuels to dissolve in water. The trick would be to have large amounts of iron as part of the containment structure close to the fuel. Whilst the iron would be expected to corrode under the anaerobic conditions underground, this same process would generate the hydrogen necessary to prevent the nuclear fuel dissolving in groundwater and leaking out. Sounds like a natural win-win!

http://www.huliq.com/11/80137/hydrogen-protects-nuclear-fuel-final-storage

Big Bangs

What can the smallest explosion tell us?

A tiny atomic-force microscope (AFM), dubbed the world’s smallest controlled heat source has allowed scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Texas Tech University to study explosives that have nanometer-scale features. The research provides new information about such phenomena as melting, evaporation and decomposition of explosives at the smallest length scales which could ultimately one day lead to safer explosives and better control over how they work.

http://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article.aspx?AreaID=4&ArticleID=20287

Water - the vehicle of explosions

Using first-principle atomistic simulations of the detonation of the high explosive PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), a team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has shown that water, in hot dense environments, plays an unexpected role in catalyzing complex explosive reactions. The phenomenon is due to the formation of different ions within the water that transport oxygen between reaction centres. This finding is contrary to the prevailing view that water was simply a stable detonation product. The new discovery could have implications for scientists studying the interiors of Uranus and Neptune where water exists under similarly extreme conditions.