Thanks to Obama, Big Oil Shifts on Global Warming

Confronted with a sharp change of priorities in Washington, international oil executives are expressing an eagerness to work with President Barack Obama to fashion new policies to tackle global warming.

At an industry conference recently, the executives struck a conciliatory tone on how to limit the emissions that are contributing to climate change, with many of them sounding like budding conservationists as they stressed energy efficiency and the need to develop renewable fuels.

On tackling global warming, some executives said they supported a tax on carbon, while others favored a trading system like the one adopted by Europe. Almost all of them seemed reconciled to the United States' adopting some kind of climate policy and said they were eager to work with the new administration to devise an effective energy strategy.

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ExxonMobil Integrated Hole Quality Drills With Much Higher Efficiency

Exxon Mobil technology has resulted in a world record-setting well at the Sakhalin-1 oil project in eastern Russia, enabling the production of more energy while reducing the impact on the environment.

The well was drilled from land, using the world's most powerful land-based rig and employing extended-reach technology, to a target area in the oil reservoir located under the ocean about 7 miles or 11 kilometers from shore – roughly the distance of 125 U.S. football fields.

“Employing extended-reach technology to drill onshore beneath the seafloor to offshore oil and gas deposits eliminates the need for additional offshore structures, pipelines and associated activities,” said the company

The team used ExxonMobil’s leading-edge technologies to drill the record Z-12 well in half the time needed by conventional technology.

ExxonMobil used its Integrated Hole Quality technology to manage a broad range of well variables, including rock strength and stresses and well-bore hydraulics, together with an optimization process called Fast Drill, which analyzes the amount of energy used to make the drilling process faster and more efficient.

Fighting Oil Pirates with Technology

Just as technology may have helped to promote the fall of the Robert Louis Stevenson-type of pirate, say historians (increased size and speed may have helped merchant vessels evade pursuing pirates), there is hope that technological advances will help protect cargos, vessels and crews.

Satellite-based maps produced by using grid technology are one promising anti-piracy tool. Different versions of these maps can tell the location of reported incidents and when they occurred, the identity and location of highjacked vessels, and the geographic areas with the highest density of attacks — accurate to within 100 meters. Some are offered in 3-D imagery.

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Aerogel Ultimate Sponge For Cleaning Up Oil Spills?

Scientists in Arizona and New Jersey are reporting that aerogels, a super-lightweight solid sometimes called “frozen smoke,” may serve as the ultimate sponge for capturing oil from wastewater and effectively soaking up environmental oil spills.
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In the new study, Robert Pfeffer and colleagues point out that the environmental challenges of oil contamination go beyond widely publicized maritime oil spills like the Exxon Valdez incident.

Experts estimate that each year people dump more than 200 million gallons of used oil into sewers, streams, and backyards, resulting in polluted wastewater that is difficult to treat. Although there are many different sorbent materials for removing used oil, such as activated carbon, they are often costly and inefficient. Hydrophobic silica aerogels are highly porous and absorbent material, and seemed like an excellent oil sponge.

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New Imaging & Mapping Technology Could Improve Oil Extraction

Picture this: an accurate map of a large underground oil reservoir that can guide engineers' efforts to coax the oil from the vast rocky subsurface into wells where it can be pumped out for storage or transport.

Researchers in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have developed technology that can generate such a map, which has the potential to significantly increase the amount of oil extracted from reservoirs.

The new technology uses the digital image compression technique of JPEG to create realistic-looking, comprehensive maps of underground oil reservoirs using measurements from scattered oil wells. These maps would be the first to provide enough detail about an oil reservoir to guide oil recovery in the field in real time.

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The Oil & Gas RFID Solution Group's 2009 Plan

The Oil & Gas RFID (OGR) Solution Group recently outlined its 2009 plan for advancing RFID Technology with the Petroleum and Petrochemical Industries. As part of its long term objectives to "develop systems with the help of a consolidated effort of Oil & Gas professionals", some of the groups new participants include BP (formally British Petroleum), Dow Chemical, Oracle, and Texas Instruments. It has also announced the opening of its 52 acre live-lab facility, which includes simulated petroleum and petrochemical environments where testing of field equipment and application systems can be performed.

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